Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0088/00885.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 17KB | 293 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00885}
$Pretitle{260}
$Title{China
Friendship and Obligation in Chinese Negotiating Style}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Richard H. Solomon}
$Affiliation{Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs}
$Subject{chinese
officials
prc
negotiating
political
foreign
principles
negotiation
negotiator
american}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Country:     China
Book:        National Negotiating Styles
Author:      Richard H. Solomon
Affiliation: Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs
Date:        1987

Friendship and Obligation in Chinese Negotiating Style

     This essay describes the political negotiating style that senior
officials of the U.S. government are likely to encounter in dealing with
counterparts from the People's Republic of China (PRC). The description is
based on interviews with American officials who conducted negotiations with
the Chinese during the 1970s in efforts to normalize U.S.-PRC relations
and on an analysis of the official negotiating record and related materials,
such as Chinese press statements.

     The following analysis will give the American negotiator a sense of what
many foreigners find to be an esoteric and appealing atmosphere, yet an often
trying pattern of manipulations, in formal negotiating encounters with the
Chinese. Above all, U.S. officials should draw confidence from the fact that
their PRC counterparts will conduct negotiations in a relatively predictable
manner, one which has been dealt with effectively in the past by other
officials of the U.S. government in pursuit of American policy objectives.

The Chinese Setting

     The experience of the past decade indicates that the Chinese conduct
negotiations in a way that Americans find distinctive in its atmosphere and
characteristics, even though individual elements of the process are not
unique to the Chinese. PRC negotiators reflect a composite tradition that
embodies their own culture and history, the Soviet-Communist influence, and
partial adaptation to the diplomatic conventions of the West. The American
negotiator will not be exposed to Marxist-Leninist rhetoric or concepts by
his Chinese counterpart; yet PRC officials will use ideological formulations
in internal documents and in press articles to explain policy positions.

     The American official is likely to be most impressed by the "Chineseness"
of his first visits to Beijing (Peking) - the self-assured and subtle manner
in which officials handle substantive issues, and the cultured ambience
created by the hospitality of his hosts, the banquet cuisine, and sightseeing
trips to the Great Wall or Forbidden City. These aspects of the negotiating
process will be purposefully orchestrated by the Chinese to create a sense of
their country's great tradition and future potential - and in partial
compensation for its current political and economic weaknesses.

     Because the Chinese see politics as a very personalized process, rather
than the working of institutions, they are very sensitive to signs of
factional leadership conflict. They see their own governmental system as
highly vulnerable to such conflict, and in dealings with foreigners they will
go to great lengths to stress the unity of their contemporary leadership-even
while admitting to the baleful effects on China of such recent periods of
political turmoil as the "Cultural Revolution." Thus, the foreign negotiator
will find that his Chinese counterparts will try to mask internal political
processes from his understanding.

     Recent experience has shown that PRC negotiating positions are highly
sensitive to the play of political factionalism in Beijing. A strong leader
can promote a policy that a collective leadership would be unable to support,
or a negotiating position may be withdrawn or hardened in the course of a
negotiation as a result of factional conflict within the leadership. Thus, the
U.S. negotiator faces the difficult task of assessing the measure of
flexibility of his Chinese counterparts in terms of internal political
processes that are - by the intent of his hosts - difficult to estimate. As a
general rule, it can be assumed that the more rigid and posturing a Chinese
negotiator or the more "irrational" a PRC negotiating position seems to be,
the more factional political pressures are influencing the negotiating
process.

National Characteristics

The Cultivation and Use of "Friends of China"

     Chinese officials are single-minded and highly disciplined in their
pursuit of PRC interests; yet as Chinese they are distrustful of impersonal or
legalistic negotiations. The most fundamental characteristic of dealings with
the Chinese is their attempt to identify foreign officials who are
sympathetic to their cause, to cultivate a sense of friendship and obligation
in their official counterparts, and then to pursue their objectives through
a variety of stratagems designed to manipulate feelings of friendship,
obligation, guilt, or dependence. This reflects the workings of a culture that
has developed to a high level the management of interpersonal relations
(guanxi), a society that stresses interdependency rather than individuality,
and a political system that sees politics as the interplay between superior
and dependent rather than the association of equals.

     Thus, the Chinese will go to great lengths to collect information on the
opinions and personal preferences of their official counterparts, not just
attitudes on political issues but personal likes as to food and music as well.
They will then use such information to develop a sense of personal
relationship. Dinnertime conversations and sight-seeing banter are viewed by
PRC officials as opportunities both to gain such information and to cultivate
a mood of "friendship."

     When Chinese officials speak of "friendship" or identify a foreigner as
an "old friend," it should be remembered that in their tradition "friendship"
implies obligations as much as good personal relations. Moreover, PRC
officials limit their dealings with foreign "friends" strictly to formal
occasions. Contemporary Chinese have highly mixed feelings about foreigners.
On the one hand they admire and covet the power and economic progress that
they see in the West - which they seek to gain through foreign "friendships."
On the other hand, they resent China's backwardness, dependence on outsiders,
and the feeling that they have been ill-treated in the past by those on whom
they have relied for help in modernizing their country. Such resentment has
been most evident in their attitudes toward China's former Soviet allies; yet
in other periods of the past century one sees efforts by the Chinese to
establish friendly relations with foreign countries and then bitter
disappointment as their high hopes (and often unrealistic demands) for
support and assistance have not been fully realized.

Commitment to "Principles"

     Perhaps because of the highly personalized and, upon occasion,
opportunistic quality of their own politics and their ambivalent feelings
about dealing with foreigners, the Chinese seek to establish their own ground
rules in negotiation by emphasizing their commitment to certain general
"principles." In recent history this has taken the form of a stress on
Marxism, the principles of "peaceful coexistence," or political understandings
such as were embodied in the Shanghai Communique signed with the United States
in 1972.

     Thus, a Chinese official can be expected to initiate a negotiation either
by pressing his foreign counterpart to agree to certain general principles or
by invoking past agreements of a general nature with the foreigner's
predecessors which he is expected to accept and abide by. A Chinese negotiator
will judge the degree of commitment of his foreign counterpart to a
relationship with China by his acceptance of relevant principles, and as a
negotiation proceeds he will seek to constrain his interlocutor's room for
bargaining maneuver by invoking "principle" in order to critique his
counterpart's position.

     Nonetheless, th