Negotiating With Chinese Companies: Screaming As A Tactic

I wrote a post the other day on Linkedin, entitled, How to Negotiate with Chinese Companies. Someone left the following comment in response to the post:

How bout get in their face and tell it like it is! That usually wipes the fake smiles and nervous laughter off their face pretty quick! Don’t give the Chinese one inch of room to move, if you get pissed bang on the table and scream in their face; they hate confrontation and will always back down. They are constantly worried about a loss of temper from a laowai, if you get a reputation as a hot head you will get what you want.

My initial feeling upon seeing this was consternation simply because I do not consider anger as a good method for achieving one’s goals, unless and until all else has failed. If you are calm and rational and that does not work, you can try anger and that might work. But if you start out with anger it becomes extremely difficult to win someone over by switching to a calm and rational approach. I am not saying anger never works or never makes sense because it sometimes does. But I am saying that using it as a first approach is virtually always unwise. And when you do employ anger, you should be sure to employ it in a controlled way, so that your counterpart does not flee from you, but realizes that you are one favor away from being calm and rational again. I last got angry with Comcast (I mean, who doesn’t) and even then I was sure to constantly interject with “I’m not mad at you, I’m just mad about the fact that Comcast seems to be asking me to pay the price for its own incompetence.”

But when it comes to China, I have my doubts about the value of ever using anger as a method for effecting business change. My sense has always been that getting angry will lead your Chinese counterpart to at that moment act as though he or she is agreeing with you and what you are proposing, but that once you are gone your Chinese counterpart will do whatever can be done never to have anything to do with you ever again.

Anger in China, does it ever make sense as a strategy for advancing a business deal or relationship? We’d love to see your comments on this below.

The post Negotiating With Chinese Companies: Screaming As A Tactic appeared first on China Law Blog.

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