Guanxi - Chinese Business Practices Are Built on "Trust"

Filed in archive Venture Capital on October 18, 2007

One of the biggest difficulties Western business people face when they go into China to find partners is a cultural one. Most Westerners don't fully understand that Chinese business people value what they call guanxi, or "trust" - and they need to feel it before the enter into a business relationship.

China Success Stories has a great article online at the moment by Ernie Talda that looks at the Chinese concept of guanxi.

When I was doing my graduate work in linguistics at the Australian National University, one of the ideas that I came to understand was that a word in any given language has no exact translation in another language. Take simple words like the names for colors. First you must consider that colors come in a graduated spectrum of wave lengths. Technically, there are millions of colors. How many words can you think of for color names? Even if you revert to the sort of fashion color names that women use to describe their clothes (never wear an eggplant blouse with sea-foam pants) you'll come up with a few dozen words, not a million.

Then there are connotations. If you say "the woman in red" in the Tok Pisin language of Papua New Guinea, it doesn't mean the same thing as when you use that phrase in Chicago.




The more concrete an idea is, the more semantic overlap there may be between, say, the English word for it and the Russian or Mandarin word for it. "Trust" is a pretty abstract concept. There's some semantic overlap between the idea of "trust" in English and the idea of "guanxi" in Mandarin. But the ideas are also different in many ways. Ernie Tadla does a good job of explaining what "trust" (or guanxi, at least) means in China. Take a look at his article...