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Asian Mind Game - Hardcover

Chu, Chin-ning

 
9780892563524: Asian Mind Game
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0892563524 ISBN 13: 9780892563524
Verlag: Scribner, 1991

Inhaltsangabe

This book, by East-West marketing consultant Chin-ning Chu, is must reading for any Westerner in business, government, or academia who negotiates in the Orient or wants to.
It is the first to reveal to Westerners the deep secrets of the Asian psyche that influence Asian behavior in business, politics, lifestyle, and battle.
Ms. Chu points out that Asian mind games have become so finely tuned over the centuries that Americans seldom realize that Asians view the marketplace (and by extension, the world) as a battlefield, and act accordingly.
She has extracted the principles of successful negotiations from centuries-old Chinese texts that have influenced all of Asia, and provides her readers with examples of their application in the modern world.
In the Western world, the ability to formulate cunning and subtle strategies for getting your own way in business, politics, and everyday life is regarded as a matter of intuition. In Asia, however, strategic thinking is a formal discipline studied by people from all walks of life. Amazing as it may seem, contemporary Asians base their outlook and behavior on the teachings of the ancients. In China, even children are familiar with the "36 Strategies," formulated by Sun Tzu, a famous military strategist, in the fourth century B.C.
Throughout Asia today, business people as well as political figures study Sun Tzu's Art of War and apply its strategies to all their activities, while Americans read The One-Minute Manager and All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten. No wonder, Ms. Chu comments, that when it comes to business and political negotiations, the Chinese refer to Americans with a word that means "innocent children."
Ms. Chu brilliantly analyses how Chinese thought and culture have affected Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and how Japanese conquest and culture have had their effect on the rest of Asia.
With United States trade and political alliances shifting increasingly to the Pacific rim, it becomes ever more urgent to understand the Asian mind. Ms. Chu, born in China and educated in Taiwan, spells out the makeup of the Asian psyche as no Westerner could.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chin-Ning Chu is president of Asian Marketing Consultants, Inc. She counsels Western companies doing or wishing to do business in Asia. Born in Teinjin, near Beijing, she was raised in Taiwan after the fall of mainland China to the Communists. She has studied the teachings of sages in India, China, and Europe and believes her study of philosophy and psychology provides her with a powerful tool with which to examine the complexities of philosophical, sociological, and historical influences on the shaping of the modern Asian mind. Ms. Chu lives in Beaverton, Oregon.

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Chapter 1

Preparing for the Game

The telephone in my Beijing hotel room rang. It was the Washington Post's Beijing Bureau Chief, Daniel Southerland, asking if I could meet the following day with him and a Canadian businessman, whom we will call David Buyer. He told me Mr. Buyer had taken a beating on his first business foray into China. Knowing that I was in the city, Dan thought Mr. Buyer might want to talk to me about what had gone wrong. We met in the lounge of the hotel and found a quiet corner where we could speak freely.

David Buyer came from a Canadian family with a long-established reputation in the fur business. Four months earlier, Buyer had flown into China on a custom-fitted Boeing 747 with 3,200 live foxes. In exchange for the foxes and his technical assistance in setting up scientific breeding and feeding programs, he had expected to return to Canada with about a million dollars' profit. But things had not worked out that way.

Mr. Buyer was leaving on the next day's early flight bound for home. He would leave without his million dollars and without his foxes. Once at home he would close the books on a loss of about a half million dollars and would attempt to save his fox farm from foreclosure.

David Buyer's unfortunate adventure started in the summer of 1988. Months passed as he waited impatiently for the arrival of a Chinese delegation that was to inspect the foxes. Buyer thought that perhaps they didn't want to make such a long trip and were putting it off. The real problem, however, was the complicated passport and entry visa procedures they were dealing with.

Buyer was selling breeding stock to the Chinese, and he did not want to miss the fox breeding season. As the season neared, he grew more and more anxious. He was confident that his stock would pass the most rigorous inspection, so he notified the Chinese that he would fly the foxes to China. They could conclude the deal on his arrival. The Chinese voiced no objection to the idea. At the moment the jet lifted off with its noisy cargo, Mr. Buyer's deal was already dead, but he would not find that out for several months.

Shortly after Buyer arrived in China, the price of fox dropped on the world fur market. Since Buyer had 3,200 unsold and hungry foxes 10,000 miles from home, the Chinese used the market fluctuation as a pretext to renegotiate the contract. To put even more pressure on him, the Chinese charged with the care of the foxes deliberately starved them and crowded them into very small cages. Soon disease and mistreatment had killed 150 of Buyer's foxes.

When Buyer found out that the Chinese had started buying quantities of foxes from a breeder in Finland, he was ready to cut his losses. He sought out intermediaries who could break the impasse and put together a deal for him before all his foxes were dead. The intermediaries, of course, insisted on substantial puffs. After extensive negotiation, the intermediaries managed to convince the original buyers to take 900 of the 3,200 foxes at the original price of $380 each, but these buyers would offer only $30 apiece for the remaining animals.

Eventually, the intermediaries were able to sell the remaining foxes by unofficial means at greatly reduced prices. But, in addition to cutting his prices drastically, to conclude the sale Buyer had to agree to sponsor a dozen children of various Chinese bureaucrats to be educated in Canada. Four years of college tuition and living expenses for each child was to come out of his pocket. But Buyer had learned the ways of the Chinese by now. He told them anything they wanted to hear so that he could unload his foxes and get out of there.

The evening we met, Mr. Buyer was carrying $200,000 in American currency sewn into the lining of his coat. The unofficial nature of the transactions his intermediaries had arranged precluded the usual avenues of transferring money out of China. In addition to the devastating financial loss he had suffered, he was also running a very grave risk of spending the rest of his life in a Chinese prison if airport security detected the cash.

Buyer had made a serious mistake in shipping the foxes without first receiving payment. But this was not his first or most serious mistake. It was not until my return to China in August 1989 that I found out what the real problem had been.

I decided to contact Mr. Zhang, the Chinese official who had originally arranged the deal with David Buyer. It took only a few moments' conversation with Mr. Zhang to find out what had happened. He was eager to express his anger with Mr. Buyer. Buyer's decision to fly the foxes to China instead of waiting for Zhang and his associates to come to him had robbed them of a trip to Canada to which they had looked forward for months. Foreign travel is the most prestigious and sought-after perk available to a Chinese official. They could not forgive Buyer for robbing them of their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit the West. The disappointment completely dampened their enthusiasm for the entire project.

Mr. Buyer's story is an extreme example, but the lack of understanding that it illustrates is all too common. In my professional life as a representative for Western companies doing business in Asia, I am constantly frustrated by the inability of Eastern and Western minds to meet.

The great difference between Western and Asian languages is one obvious barrier to understanding. But language is not only how we express our thoughts, it is also how we create our thoughts. The underlying cause of misunderstanding is not language itself but how we think: Asians and Westerners think as differently as they speak.

I once heard Donald Frisbee, CEO and Chairman of PacifiCorp, say, "If I could just understand how the Asian thinks, I would know how to deal with him." Mr. Frisbee is much more perceptive than most Western businessmen in recognizing the difficulty. Many just assume that they understand, and simply don't want to be told otherwise. I once spent a long afternoon listening to a man who had thirty-five years of successful marketing experience in the United States. "Marketing is marketing," he told me. "I know my business. What could be different about marketing in Asia?"

Books have been written about doing business in Asia. Many are well researched and accurate in their description of how Asians conduct their business affairs, but none I have read has shed much light on why Asians conduct business as they do. Learning about an Asian businessman's actions without understanding his motivation will not greatly help a Westerner to conduct business successfully with him. It is essential to understand the underlying causes of the Asian person's actions. This book is about those underlying causes.

Strategic thinking is deeply ingrained in the Asian mind. Specific strategies to deal with all kinds of life situations have been developed, refined, and studied for thousands of years. If the Westerner does not make an attempt to understand something of the Asian mind, he will find it almost impossible to detect the web of complicated strategies that is woven about him by his Asian counterparts, and he will fall victim to them.

Like David Buyer, too often Westerners have paid dearly for their lack of understanding in dealing with Asians. Mr. Buyer was not a fool. He made an assumption about the Chinese delegation's reasons for delaying their visit to Canada. Within the frame of reference of a Western businessman, it was a good assumption, Mr. Buyer's mistake was that he did not question his belief that what was true for him was also true for the Chinese.

I am a Chinese woman. My family lived for many generations near the Yalu River in Manchuria. As boys, my father and his friends would pay the boatman a few small coins to ferry them across the Yalu to fight mock...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
1991
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0892563524
ISBN 13 
9780892563524
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
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