A feature directed at SMEs about how to infiltrate China’s close knit business culture – and win.
Today, despite the history, and despite the vestigial imperialist architecture, Shanghai gleams. It looks, more than anything else, like the future. It’s home to around 20 million people. There are 106 buildings over 150 metres tall in Shanghai. Canada, by comparison, has just 47.
It is every inch the modern, international city. But the Shanghai, and more broadly, the China, that you tend to hear about from Western business people sounds more like something merchants could have described back when it was the Middle Kingdom. They might talk about their Chinese counterparts as “inscrutable” — conjuring, with that one word, images of rickshaws and queues. Or they might bemoan the fact that contracts are virtually meaningless, or that bribery is just another cost of doing business. And it certainly wouldn’t be surprising if they said that the most important thing you can possibly have is not money, or even a good idea. It’s guanxi — connections with Confucian baggage.
So the question is: just how international is China’s business world? How do you cull the good advice from the bad? How do you succeed in a place that seems like another world? And finally, is it even worth it?