28...The Cultural Negotiation & The Grey Area

Casey

We had our Investment Committee meeting on Wednesday and one of the major themes of the talk was how to move forward successfully with our Field Partner contract negotiation. One of our committee members brought up an interesting comment: "In the US, contract signing is the end of negotiation. In China, contract signing is only the beginning of negotiation."

Right after I sent the meeting minutes to Zhang Sheng, our Director of Field Partnerships who's leading our negotiations, I heard a chuckle from the other side of the room as he repeated the quote out loud. Here was his response was:

"In China, when you enter into a partnership you know that there are a million different issues that could arise that are not outlined in the contract itself. That's when you get into the Grey Area. How you and your partner work through those issues depends on your relationship."

Those of you who have lived or done business in China are probably pretty familiar with the Grey Area. I attended a Tsinghua in this NGO and civil society course two years ago and we were discussing the current situation in China in which there are around three million NGOs in China, but only five percent of them are actually registered. I didn't undertand how this could be possible, so he explained to me "In China there is the law and then there's what people actually do."

Interested in learning more about this phenomenon, I checked out the definition of grey area on Wikipedia:

A grey area is a term for a border in-between two or more things that is unclearly defined, a border that is hard to define or even impossible to define, or a definition where the distinction border tends to move. There are several flavors of grey areas:

• A grey area of definitions signifies a problem of sorting reality into clearly cut categories. Example: where is the border between erotica and pornography?
• A grey area of law is an area where no clear legislation or precedent exists, or where the law has not been applied in a long time thus making it unclear if it is applicable at all.
• A grey area of ethics signifies an ethical dilemma, where the border between right and wrong is blurred. Example: is killing always abominable?

Comments

[Leslie]

So true! I remember bargaining with my Chinese boss about getting reimbursed for my plane ticket home, and she started claiming that her English was "very poor," though she was the one who wrote the contract! I'm excited to see how these negotiations work out for Wokai and our field partners.