Dealing with the Chinese culture and its critical aspects in a Sino-Italian Joint Venture

Abstract

Under the push of globalization forces in the field of economy, political agree-ments and connectivity resources, crossing long distances requires an effort in-comparably lower than in the past. Contextually to this homogenization, touch-ing local habits and living authentically the place we travel to, with the relative difficulties, is not an unavoidable choice anymore; experiencing local culture is often just an option for people that, in their holidays, want to encounter local tra-ditions and specific habits: in fact, whatever place they visit they might as well find similar clothes to wear, commodities, food or places to live, avoiding much of the stress deriving from an adaptive approach that wants them to be flexible, if they simply don’t want to. Travelling for business rarely gives the possibility to make this choice. Al-beit this tendency toward homogeneity, the existence of infinite shapes of cul-tures in the world cannot be ignored during professional exchanges: they still re-quire to be conscious and proactive in approaching social interactions. The diffi-culty to deal with cultural typical aspects is often indicated as the reason of fail-ure for multi-national enterprises, but the actual cause can be ascribed to scarce competencies more than to differences themselves. The encounter of many dif-ferent cultures under the umbrella of business activities can be seen as a vast panorama of new possibilities and companies must familiarize with a set of un-precedented skills in order to succeed. In this fast-revolving landscape, China remained almost inaccessible from the rest of the world for centuries: the Himalaya mountains together with the cold steppes in the North, the Pacific Ocean in the East and the hostile jungles in the Southern areas have impeded an exchange of cultural traits that were al-ready very far from each other. Thanks to the economic growth and the leading role that China is assuming in the world pattern, the chances for Italian and Chi-nese managers to meet in business are much higher. What are the most relevant cultural features resulting in negotiating a deal for a company? And which skills must managers possess if they want to enhance their possibility to succeed? This thesis was moved by the curiosity to answer these questions, while enlarging my knowledge about how the world perception changes among differ-ent cultures, about how these ethnical structures shape the way every individual sees the world around; the reasons that pushed me in researching and analyzing the existent literature on the matter are similar to the ones that led me to study languages the first place: people are different and behave dissimilarly around the world, communication styles and cultural backgrounds are likely to influence the way people approach their daily life, which among these variances have a main effect on business behavior? Beside the sparkle of interest, the necessity of a new challenging working position recently pushed me in the same direction: being busy in managing the project of a Sino-Italian Joint Venture for an Italian company implicitly required me to improve my abilities in this arena and to find out which are the essential skills to act properly. My experience on the field, albeit at its dawn, is been used as an inspiration to further consideration on the argument. In my work of research, I wanted to explore the main topics that relates to the experience of establishing a Joint Venture in China: this business form is suitable to enhance the possibilities of creating value from cross-cultural ex-change of resources, and I tried to give a sight on different themes, from the cross-cultural to legislative environment. In the first part of this work I will intro-duce the idea of culture, with an approach that focuses on China and compares its specificities with the ones of Italian and Western cultures;