Negotiating with China- I
After four decades of a political standoff, the recent thaw in Sino-Indian relations has seen a renewal of dialogue and the start of substantive negotiations between the two countries. But negotiating with the Chinese – the inscrutable Orientals, as the Europeans called them – requires a very different set of sensitivities and skills to what we Indians are accustomed. Our negotiating skills have largely been limited to Americans, Europeans and West Asians who are distinctly more transparent, open and non-contextual in their negotiations than the Chinese or the traditional Japanese.
The fact of the matter, however, is that the Chinese manner of negotiation can easily be related to orthodox or traditional Indian cultural values and norms. The problem is that over the last couple of centuries, the western mode of education has fairly effectively suppressed these traditional characteristics and we perceive the process of negotiation through a highly westernised prism. Were we to look deep into our roots, we would find many values which are common with the Chinese, and realisation of these could eventually sensitise us and give us success in our negotiations with them.
Let us examine where the average Chinese is coming from and why he behaves the way he does at the negotiating table. It is imperative to understand the context of Chinese culture and values, compare these with our own reactions or biases on such matters, so as to avoid the many pitfalls and misunderstandings that can occur.
Like India, China too is a vast nation with many diverse people, dialects, cuisines, practices and beliefs. What binds this nation together? There would appear to be four major binding cords.
The first cord is the common agrarian background. Like in India, the vast majority of Chinese still live in rural areas and have strong links to the land. As in India, most of the city dwellers continue to retain their rural links and regularly return to their villages to “renew their cultural energy.” As a result, merchants, middlemen, officials of certain types, are looked down upon.
The second cord is morality. The foundations of Chinese education were laid over 2,000 years ago by the writings of Confucius. He maintained that a society organised under a benevolent moral code would be prosperous and politically stable. He taught reverence for scholarship and kinship. He defined the five cardinal relationships between ruler and ruled, husband and wife, parents and children, older and younger brothers, and friend and friend.
Except for the last, all the relationships were strictly hierarchical. The ruled – wives, children, younger brothers – were counselled to be obedient and loyal to their elders, seniors, parents or rulers. In return, they would be treated with benevolence, protected from harm and allowed to live in social harmony.
The Chinese are extremely hierarchical – they revere authority: the authority of age, seniority, position, designation, and intellectualism.
Another great philosopher, who has helped shape the Chinese psyche, was Lao Tsu. He believed that two fundamental forces, Yin (the feminine, dark, and passive force) and Yang (the masculine, light and active force) are always opposed as well as complementary to each other, and success lies in finding the Tao or the middle path between these forces. The Yin and Yang, always in collision and collusion, are all pervading and affect all aspects of life from medicine to economic cycles.
The Chinese are known to be a very practical people. Their philosophy, the philosophy of Confucius and Lao Tsu is grounded in practicality. Not for them the search for some abstract, all-pervading “Truth”. They were and are more concerned with finding the path, the way, the Tao that would lead to success.
Naturally, this affects the Chinese negotiating style. They are more concerned with the manner in which the process of negotiation is conducted than at quickly arriving at the end result of that negotiation. The means being important, a lot of haggling and give-and-take is involved. The process cannot be cut short. A quick result would mean that the best middle path has not been searched for. At the same time, a compromise is a win-win situation and allows both parties to hold an equally valid position.
The third cord is the Chinese pictographic script. Chinese children have to learn to memorise thousands of pictorial characters. Michael Harris Bond, Professor of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, feels that because of this, the Chinese are better at holistic processing of information – at seeing the big picture as compared to other peoples that are trained in sequential alphabetic letters.
The fourth cord is the wariness with which the Chinese people view foreigners. Throughout history, interaction with foreigners has brought nothing but grief to the Chinese, whether the foreigners were European gwailos (literally: long noses) or other Asians like the Japanese. Combined with a great deal of internal squabbling, civil wars, dissensions and so on, the result has been considerable cynicism about rule of law and rules in general. This cynicism often reflects in their less-than-desirable commitment to observance of various rules concerning intellectual property rights, patents, missile non-proliferation regimes, and the like. They have learnt over the centuries that the powerful can and do spurn all commitments and understandings with impunity.