Chinese Etiquette and Ethics in Business (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In addition to having one of the oldest continuous civilizations, China is also huge in size, encompassing a total of 3.7 million square miles in..." (more)
Key Phrases: foreign businesspeople, expatriate businesspeople, foreign businessperson, Hong Kong, United States, Cultural Revolution (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In this new edition of "Chinese Etiquette & Ethics in Business", Boye Lafayette De Mente, who has lived and worked in the Far East for over thirty years, reveals the historic factors, collective traits, and individual qualities that determine how the Chinese do business today and the direction their economies will take in the future. His is an insider's view, whether he is discussing the overhaul of laws controlling business development or the importance of good social relationships to successful business relationships. If you are a businessperson who'd like to do business with the Chinese successfully - "Chinese Etiquette & Ethics in Business" should be at the top of your "must read" list.

About the Author

Boye Lafayette De Mente has lived and worked in the Far East for over thirty years.

Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional; 2nd edition (November 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071448179
• ISBN-13: 978-0071448178
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,051,522 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars De Mente's book fails to account for regional differences., June 14, 1998

By	Eric T. Shepherd ([e-mail]) (Qingdao, PRC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chinese Etiquette & Ethics In Business (Paperback)

After reading Boye Lafayette De Mente's Chinese Etiquette and Ethics in Business, I felt it imperative to respond because I found major flaws in his analysis. De Mente has spent thirty years in Japan and East Asia, but is clearly not an expert on Chinese etiquette and ethics in business. He appears to have collected information from a wide variety of sources and thrown them all together claiming that he is writing about Chinese business etiquette. However, he does not distinguish which Chinese culture he is referring to and often mixes characteristics of the etiquette observed in different Chinese subcultures. Many of the tips he gives as things to do in Chinese etiquette would cause serious social blunders in Shandong business culture. He frequently mixes Cantonese customs and northern Chinese customs which, under certain circumstances, are incompatible. I have included a few examples of where De Mente's analysis does not fit in the business culture found in Shandong Province.

De Mente obviously does not have a clear understanding of the northern Chinese psychology when he states that Chinese downplay the status one's friends and employer. This would certainly depend on who is present when the "downplaying" occurs. Northern Chinese often laud their friend's accomplishments in order to give them face and would never speak in a negative fashion about their employer while he or anyone who might inform him of what was being said was present because of the obvious consequences. Furthermore, the essence of interacting within northern Chinese culture is personal friendships which can be very intimate rather than being between organizations as De Mente purports. Normally, Shandongnese businessmen do business with an organization because of the personal friendship between two members of the respective organizations.

De Mente also suggests to "look the other party directly in the eyes, and say something simple in Chinese" in order to break the psychological block many Chinese have a! bout Chinese speaking foreigners. This tactic may appear to be effective in the immediate encounter, but it would be much too direct for most northern Chinese to accept. Furthermore, it would be a direct affront to their face. Rather than facilitating interaction with them, in the long term, it would more than likely cause them not to want to interact with an individual even though he has the ability to speak Chinese. Because one can speak Chinese, the expectation is that he also has a certain level of understanding of the culture. Therefore, this very un-Chinese behavior would be more damaging than not interacting in Chinese at all.

In his chapter on eating and drinking etiquette, De Mente states that the host is seated nearest the door and that "In Chinese etiquette, the left side is the seat of honor." However, in Shandong banquette culture the principle host is always seated furthest from the door and the seat of honor is always to the principle host's right. Furthermore, if a Shandong host were to only sip his alcoholic beverage while his guests were drinking full glasses, as De Mente suggests is the case, he would be seen as not fulfilling his responsibilities as host. Moreover, such an action would be a direct affront to his guests' face. Refusing to drink with someone, which includes the amount that is consumed with each drink, is tantamount to refusing to give that person face. This type of host would also be deemed as not being forthright because he refuses to drink to his ability. Thus, Shandong guests would not want to conduct business with such a host because he is not willing to reveal everything about himself to them.

Also, De Mente translates suiyi as 'to sip.' Sip might be what some guests do when the host tells them to suiyi, but suiyi does not mean to sip. This is a phrase commonly used by hosts to accomplish one of three tasks. One, it is a means for calling a time out in the performance. Actors can then eat a few bites of food and chat freely. This suiyi can be transla! ted as 'as you please.' Suiyi can also be used by hosts to display to the guests that he is performing his duties as host. In this usage, it should translate something roughly equivalent to 'Make yourself at home.' The third use of suiyi comes in the drinking context. Sometimes it means '[we are not going to play the Shandong banquet game today.] Don't stand on formalities.' However, when used in the context of drinking wars, it should be translated as 'Since you can't handle drinking very much, you do not have to drink your entire glass.' Combine this with the fact that glasses are filled almost to the point of overflowing, and the result is De Mente's 'sip.'

Finally, one glance at De Mente's glossary should inform the reader of the book's major flaw. It is a hodgepodge of Cantonese and Mandarin terms thrown together without being distinguished. Were the reader to adopt many of the phrases listed in the common business vocabulary section, he would have great difficulty being comprehended by Shandong businessmen.

Therefore, I would not recommend the person not familiar with Chinese culture who can not distinguish among the regional subcultures to use this book as a guide to interacting with Chinese professionals. The notion of subculture must be considered when professionally interacting with Chinese businessmen.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Very Superficial Book, August 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Chinese Etiquette & Ethics In Business (Paperback)

I returned this book after reading half of it and skimming the other half. I can't find a single original observation to point to, and many of the observations about "Chinese etiquette" are really just observations about etiquette in general - such as the universal practice of starting a conversation with small talk.

One particularly annoying part of this book is the author's practice of compling long lists of Chinese vocabularly, phrases, place names, and historical references, and then failing to provide the character or "tone" marks. As anyone with an even cursory knowledge of China knows, Chinese is a tonal language and, hence, without tone marks a vocabulary item is completely useless to a foreigner. Moreover, the author misspells many of the pinyin transliterations, and often provides phonetic transliterations that are non-standard or inacurrate.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not recommended, April 6, 2005

By	Carolyn M. Bloomer (Sarasota, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Chinese Etiquette & Ethics In Business (Paperback)

This book is chock-full of erroneous, confusing, and even harmful information. De Mente's information is so superficial, stereotyping, and ethnocentric as to verge on racism. E.g., the Chinese as "simpleminded" (25), Taiwan as "turning out students who are little better than robots" (23); "incapable of viewing the overall picture" (127). He writes of cultural values and customs as "cop-outs" (140); "psychological ploys" (141), "syndromes" (142), "mentalities" (193). The author's deep insensitivity to Chinese culture causes him to oversimplify and give advice that may actually alienate the reader from Chinese people: e.g., to get in the other person's face, stare into their eyes, and speak something extremely simple; repeat until they respond. (p. 91).

Throughout the book de Mente makes an utter mess of Chinese language. In addition to countless typographical errors, he mixes several different Romanization systems together with a pronunciation guide that is both idiosyncratic and often just plain wrong. He does not differentiate between `Mandarin' and Cantonese --as, for example when listing titles such as President, Director, etc. (130) even though he has stated earlier that they are `mutually unintelligible" languages. He insists on reversing the traditional order of Chinese names so that Mao Zedong becomes Zedong Mao, Sun Yat-sen becomes Yat-sen Sun, and the venerable Daoist sage known to the whole literate world as Laozi (aka Lao-tze or Lao-tsu) becomes Ze Lao. And Taijiquan (aka T'ai Chi Ch'uan) becomes Dai Ji Juan (169) - which makes no sense in ANY system!

Information sources tend to be generalized as unspecified "critics", "sociologists", etc., without citations. The book has neither an index nor a bibliography. All in all, it's hard to believe that the publisher didn't insist on more integrity.

As a cultural anthropologist who has done field-research in mainland China since 1988, I found this book deeply offensive, and would not recommend it to anyone at all.