When coming into a new century, the commercial transaction between China and America who hold the balance all over the world, becomes increasingly frequent. Therefore, business negotiations of Sino-US during the cooperation are more often than ever. If lacking a shared basis of cultural backgrounds, negotiators from two countries can run into thorny problems that obstruct them from successful collaborations. In order to make the business negotiations between China and the United States go with a swing, negotiators are required an understanding of other cultures and knowledge of negotiation skills. Hence, the analysis will be made on the Sino-US business negotiations from cross-cultural perspectives. 

To pursue the target, section two provides an overview of the literature on culture and communication, business negotiation, leading into the appliance of cross-cultural communication on the business negotiations. The next section will discuss Sino-US cross-cultural business negotiations, containing distinguished features belonging to bilateral negotiations. Then, the author, using a classic case, will give a specific analysis on cultural differences between Chinese and American negotiators. In section four, effective measures to promote Sino-US Business Negotiations are specifically analyzed.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Culture and Communication

Culture is inextricably interwoven with communication, so people can not have one without another. Culture is to communication what water is to fish. While culture provides context for communication, communication facilitates the cultural diffusion and sharing on the converse. As Smith noted, “Whenever people interact they communicate. To live in societies and to maintain their culture they have to communicate.” (Smith, 1966: v) Culture is learned, acted out, transmitted, and preserved through communication (Samovar, Porter and Stefani, 2000: 22).

But what on earth is culture? As to the emblematical elaboration of culture, which provides a thorough grounding for us to understand it, it is from the 19th century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Taylor in the first paragraph of his Primitive Culture (1871), “Culture…taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”(Taylor, 1871: 1) Nowadays, there are many definitions of the culture, but Edward Hall put forward the most acceptable one, “Culture is the total accumulation of beliefs, customs, values, behaviors, institutions and communication patterns that are shared, learned and passed down through the generations in an identifiable group of people”. In a word, culture refers to all-encompassing patterns of attitudes, values, life style, arts, beliefs and behaviors which are characteristics of all human activity. Culture, which consists not only of material subjects, such as artistic works, buildings and clothes, but also of non-material things like roles, knowledge, concepts and customs, is ubiquitous and multidimensional. The concept of culture defined by Samovar, Porter and Stefani in their book Communication between Cultures (2000), will be adopted, that is, “We define culture as the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religions, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through inpidual and group striving” (Samovar, Porter and Stefani, 2000: 36).

Various as definitions of culture are, there are still common traits which can get unanimous endorsement. According to sociolinguists and anthropologists, there are ten characteristics of importance to cross-cultural communications: (1) culture is shared, (2) culture is cumulative, (3) culture is learned, (4) culture is adaptive, (5) culture is dynamic, (6) culture is symbolic, (7)culture is relational, (8) culture is implicit and explicit, (9) culture is universal, (10) culture is persified (Liu Xiaoping, 2008: 2-11). What Lahiff and Penrose propose is that a culture is made up of many different components, including everything that a society thinks, says, does and makes. The value system, roles, religious traditions, decision-making patterns, language, and time orientation are especially strong determinants of a culture (Lahiff and Penrose, 1997: 50). The value system and decision-making patterns do provide guidelines for people to behave; meanwhile, the status roles, religious traditions and time orientation also exert a significant impact on the business in various cultures. Later in the thesis, they will be applied to analyze cultural differences between Sino-US.