The Impact of Culture on Sino-U.S. Business Activities -A New View on Culture
The rapid development of science and technology brings about the fast
development of the global economy. The speedy advancement of the information and Internet techniques are making the earth smaller, which leads to the closer relationship among countries. In order to reduce conflicts (such as the conflicts aroused by different values, religious beliefs, and national taboos etc) due to cultural differences, it has become an inevitable tendency to highlight the study of culture.
With a view to solving the business conflicts between the United States and
China, Premier Wen Jiabao recently paid a visit to America; he maintained that in
order to cut the business conflicts between two countries, the people in both countries should try to make more cultural communication and get more understanding with each other. The Sino-U.S. trade relationship has kept on a rapid and steady development in recent years; up to December 2003, America has been the largest investor of foreign capital in China for a succession of three years and has been the second largest business partner to China for many years and China, too, has become the fourth largest business partner to the U.S.A in addition to Canada, Mexico and Japan. With the further development of the economic globalization, the Sino-U.S. trade relationship will gain more weight to China and America even to the whole world. Nowadays, the competition for consumers and the markets in the international business arena doesn't only lie in the business techniques, the issues of the quality and functions of the products any longer, but in how to adapt your products to the taste of the consumers and to the target markets' expectations; in another word, that is a matter of culture. Now that the market economy has made it possible for a market to introduce the same product with varieties of brands, in order to lead consumers to make their choice of your product from the various substitutes one should turn to the huge cultural background of the consumers and the target markets for help.
China, a country with centuries of civilization history, has cultivated its own
strong complex culture system in the course of its long history, which could be a
typical eastern culture. While, America, on the other hand, as a comparatively new
developed capitalist country, hasn't got so much influential historical and aditional
accumulation. However, its rapid advancement and its economic mightiness could
never have been so without its highly developed material affluences. Under this largecultural background, naturally，the people's evaluating criterions can never be separated apart from their material achievements. As a result, for the American people and the Chinese people, the consuming and purchasing expectations and behavior and the ways of conducting business could not be identical. Therefore, there must be cultural differences existing in the international business; these differences, sometimes may lead to the business conflicts directly or even announce the failure of the business. In a certain sense, human beings are the products of culture; they have to live in certain culture circle and receive the edification from the culture and cultivate the values of obvious cultural features. So it's quite natural that, to the same thing people from different cultures could have quite different ideas and attitudes sometimes even totally opposite opinions. In the business activities, all these different ideas and attitudes could determine the kinds of products the consumers would possibly choose and the ways of conducting business adopted by the business people.
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