Chinese emotions and the ‘feel good’ factor – the WTO column

(soon also at Chinabiz and BNN)
Shanghai - One of the more interesting misunderstandings among freshly-arrived foreigners about Chinese is that they expect their new employees or colleagues to be rather detached, almost emotionless human beings. That is one of the strongest clichés about Chinese, and very, very wrong.
Some of the events over the weekend might have shown again how wrong that idea is. Most of the anti-Japanese rallies seemed rather harmless and caused hardly any real damage. But the riot in Zhejiang, where thousands villagers have beaten up scores of officials and police men after two elderly women got killed during an environmental protest, shows what happens if you hit a raw nerve in China.
I know I should not generalize, about Americans, Dutch or Chinese, but I will do so here because that seems the only way to deal with deep-rooted clichés.

Chinese are very short-fused, emotional people, who would rather follow their instinct and feelings than make decisions based on rational arguments. All too easy characteristics that are actually more Japanese than Asian, have made watching the Chinese behavior into a rather confusing activity for the un-inaugurated.
That starts with an angry Jiang Zemin, who read the more juicy paragraphs of “Shanghai Baby” to the full Polit-bureau, to illustrate why this book should be banned. It ends at the office next to yours.
Last week I ended up half a day in a trading company and witnessed an illustrative scene. On the surface the European boss and his Chinese assistant seems to get along pretty well. She was joyful, running from phone to fax, seemingly enjoying her work for a boss who did not speak any Chinese and would be pretty helpless without her.
But on the phone, in Chinese, she was delaying upcoming appointments and discussing new jobs. When her boss was gone for lunch, I carefully made some inquiries. “Are you happy in your job,” I wanted to know.
The real story spat out, even before I revealed I already knew part of the story. “I will start tomorrow in a new job,” she said. “He has not paid me over last month, and he did not give me the fulltime job he promised me.”
Obvious, she had not told her boss anything. “He is a nice guy,” she argued with herself. “And I wanted to tell him today over lunch, but he thought meeting his friends was more important than having lunch with me. Anyway, he did not pay me, why should I feel any loyalty?” We closed a pact and I promised I would not tell her boss until she would have started her new job.

Relations in China, even business relations, always contain this dose of emotional attachment. Since written contracts and verbal agreements have a limited value, the question whether you like a person – for whatever reason – and feel attached to him or her – in whatever way – is more crucial than outside China. Governments can partly outsource this work to their diplomats, but on a business and personal level, you become important.
There might be very pragmatic reasons for people to stick to written agreements. It saves a lot of time and trouble and it might lead to more business in the future. But when you neglect the ‘feel-good’ factor in business, you are creating potentially huge and unnecessary problems for yourself.

Fons Tuinstra