On Chinese Negotiators' Style In Sino-American Business Negotiation

Intercultural negotiation is not only a kind of economic and commercial activity, but also an intercultural verbal communication activity, in which, the impact of cultural differences can not be ignored. Both China and America play irreplaceable role in international affairs, and they are increasingly important to each other's economic development. In addition, they are the typical representative of eastern culture and western culture respectively. Therefore, Sino-American business negotiation has always been the focus of intercultural communication scholar's researches.The previous researches in Sino-American business negotiation have made significant achievement which helps both Chinese negotiators and American negotiators conduct negotiation smoothly. However, most of those previous researches were static ones which were based on some cultural theories but overlooked that culture was subject to change, which may generate some stereotypes.Since the implementation of the reform and opening up policy, Chinese economic system has been changing and economy has been developing remarkably. Meanwhile, Chinese people's ideology has been changing to some extent. As a result, Chinese negotiators'style has changed, too. This thesis tries to reveal how Chinese negotiators' style has changed under the influence of internal and external factors from a dynamic perspective.The famous cultural theories that are adopted in this thesis include Hofstede's individualism and collectivism theory, Hall's monochronic time orientation and polychronic time orientation theory, Weiss's twelve variables theory and Kenneth W.Thomas and Ralph H.Kilmann's conflict management style theory. The thesis chooses the perception of relationship in negotiation, time orientation and conflict management style as the items for this research. After analyzing the previous studies, the author summarizes previous Chinese negotiators'style and American negotiator's style, based on which, a piece of questionnaire is designed to investigate present Chinese negotiators'style. The comparison between the results of questionnaire research and the summaries of previous studies demonstrates some obvious changes of Chinese negotiators'style as well as consistency in some aspects with their style in the past. These results could be attributed to the influence of traditional Chinese culture, the influence of increasingly frequent intercultural communication, the increasing economic status of Chinese business negotiators and the influence of Chinese market economy system. The results of this research give us the following implications and suggestions: the attitude to Chinese business negotiators'style should be dynamic, intercultural training is necessary, Chinese business negotiators'conception is relatively difficult to change and maintaining some of our national traits is important in intercultural communication. Summaries, limitations and future efforts are presented in the end.