Introduction

In June 2004 when I was working in Philips Royal Electronics we had a training course called: "Intercultural Awareness". I was very interested in this subject.

As a Chinese who lives in Europe I have both Chinese and European culture experience, hereby I'd like to share it with you how cultural differences between western countries and China will influence personal and business relations.

Different culture refers to two meanings, in the narrow sense it means civilization (art, science, and education), in the broad anthropological sense it means collective programming of the human mind.

Culture difference affects our way of thinking, way of acting and organizing, way of relating to each other and environment, way of perceiving.

Knowing and understanding different cultures will help us to generate better alternatives and achieve our goals in an effective and smooth way.

Doing Business with China - Enjoyable or Miserable?

Many people say: 21st century - the age for "Middle Land ". ("China" in Chinese we call it "Zhong Guo", means "Middle Land ") Although it's a very sensitive subject, it shows that China plays an increasingly important role in developing the world economy.

If you pay attention on your clothes, shoes and children toys, you won't be surprised to find that almost 70%-80% of them are made in China. This means that quite lot of business people nowadays are focused on China and the Chinese market, they're approaching China in different ways; investing, looking for OEM partnerships, setting up distribution centers there, technology transfers, etc… More and more business activities will come up between western countries and China in the future.

If you ask those who have had business experience with Chinese local companies, they might confirm that there are lots of potential problems and challenges facing them as they manage across a different society. It reflects to individual behavior, business practice differences, (labor) law differences, accounting and tax differences. Most of these are related to the different cultural background.