| | Sorry, "Thick Face, Black Heart" is NOT the same as "Thick, Black Theory." The former was published fairly recently - early '90's, I think, while the latter was published in the early years of the 20th Century. The former is written by a woman who is a business consultant by trade. Her book is loosely based on the underlying threads of "Thick, Black Theory," but is a completely independent work otherwise.
According to my memory of the long interview in "Success" magazine, with the cover story "The Art of Deception," she was then making a good living by alternating between going to China to give high-priced business seminars to Chinese CEOs on the subject of how to fleece the naive, trusting, ignorant, Western barbarian businessmen, and then returning to the States to give high-priced business seminars to U.S. CEOs about how to avoid being fleeced by the sly, corrupt, dishonest Chinese businessmen.
The "Success" interview also went into some detail as to how some of the then current scams were going down. Typically, a Western company would enter into a joint effort with some Chinese company, which would last right up to the point that the Chinese company had acquired all the intellectual property and whatever else it could scam from the Western company. Then they would go bankrupt, dissolve, disappear, etc. Next, a new company or companies would appear in China, run by the very same people, employing the stolen intellectual property and/or physical machinery that had disappeared with the original company. But the Western company would only find out - if then - when knock-off products started appearing, undercutting their prices.
Often the Chinese company would send liasons to the U.S. to "work with" the U.S. company in a coordinated production effort. Various U.S. companies who tried this would then discover that a whole lot of phone traffic was happening in the middle of the night. Further investigation might reveal that the entire set of records for the company had been faxed back to China. It used to be said that the Chinese would buy ONE of anything.
One of the other points made was that it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to truly learn spoken Chinese. You can learn all the words and their separate meanings, and you can communicate using this knowledge on a purely literal basis. However, a native speaker, especially a well-educated Chinese native speaker will also have an implicit knowledge of allusions drawn from experience, history and literature which again - as I mentioned earlier in this thread - make it possible for the Chinese in a business negotiation to communicate on a level that the non-Chinese participants will not even realize is there. This was and is not restricted to the "Mandarin" system of Confucian bureaucracy.
In English, for example, if I were a State Dept. negotiator referring to some incident involving use of lethal force by police in China to suppress a demonstration by villagers whose land was being stolen, but one in which the villagers were also members of Falung Gong, I might say "That's another Waco." In context, most politically knowledgeable Americans would understand that this referred to the violent destruction of the Branch Davidian religious sect by the FBI, in which about 80 people died. That would go right over the heads of most non-Americans, although I can virtually guarantee that the Chinese negotiators would record and check out the allusion afterwards.
One interesting aspect to Chinese communication is the lack of frills. Literally everything means something. When I have done ads for the Chinese company where I'm employed, I can't put in any stylistic elements just for style or appearance - or even readability. If I try, I will invariably be called on the carpet to explain what the element is supposed to mean. The attitude is generally that I must be trying to secretly undermine the company by planting negative messages in the advertising.
One of the factors that encourages the "Art of Deception," in Chinese business culture, is that the power structures of Chinese culture are largely preemptive rather than reactive, which is more common in the West. It is assumed, for example, that any non-family employee will betray the company interests for personal benefit at the first worthwhile opportunity. That the draconian measures taken to pre-empt this would themselves be likely to encourage that very attitude by employees is, in fact, taken into account, but the assumption is thoroughly ingrained that this will happen regardless, so they have no real choice.
The Chinese computer guru who set up their original network where I work and wrote all their accounting and customer database sofware, for example, told me just before he quit in 1992 that the company had ripped him off by some $30,000 which was supposed to have been his completion bonus. In revenge, he cleverly put everything - literaly - in one network directory, knowing that the company president, who considered himself quite computer savvy, would never figure it out, as his prior experience was entirely with CP/M, which has no subdirectories.
Shortly thereafter, I was approached by other employees with a problem. They would create a file in WordStar, save it, and then discover later that it had disappeared! I was not on the network, and it took me all of 2 nanoseconds to think to ask, "how many files are in that directory?" I assumed without having ever used WordStar that it had a finite file display buffer. I then told them to write down the filename and type it in instead of using the directory display to select from. They were awestruck at my genius when it worked...
So, I wrote up a memo, with graphics, explaining the problem and suggesting solutions as to how to break the one directory up into logical subdirectories. I also spent 30 minutes creating a mini-database file in DBase, which I had never used before, to illustrate how employees could enter keywords, revision numbers, etc., to make files infinitely more findable. Then I took my memo to the company president.
Two days later he informed me that "No one could understand." Then he spent a good portion of the next two years devising a naming convention for files, as in "FW000016.pm4," which would be "Form" "Warehouse" number 16. I and several other employees wasted a few hundred man-hours revising this system until the president was satisfied. Then it was taped to every monitor and everyone was required to use it. After a few weeks or months, everyone else ignored it and returned to naming files so that they could find them. However, the president kept checking for the next year or two to make sure that I was using his system, even if noone else did.
No good deed, etc. ;)
Of course, the naming convention did nothing to solve the problem, which continued for several years, as that one C directory was jammed with tens of thousands of files. Additionally, the guy who had devised the revenge had left the text source files for the databases, etc., on the net, but no one knew what their names were. Thus, they had no way to change the compiled DBase or Clipper applications. At one point I discovered how to acquire a bunch of German trade magazines, and the Sales Manager instructed someone to find all the dealers and enter their contact info in the potential customer database. However, the German telephone numbers would not fit. So, he told the employee, "Just enter as much of the telephone number as will fit the space..."
(Edited by Phil Osborn on 3/17, 12:38pm)
(Edited by Phil Osborn on 3/17, 2:13pm)
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