Taiwan and China: Two cultures separated by a common language

Huang Guanhua - 黃冠華

http://money.chinatimes.com/news/news-content.aspx?id=20121104000829

- Want to do business in China? First think about the world.

The word in recent years out of the Taiwanese media almost always seems to assume that Taiwan is going to become the so-called "springboard" for the world's large corporations to enter China. The thinking is these business want to enter China, and Taiwan is where they can come to test the waters before they do. If all goes without a hitch, they can take what they've learned in Taiwan and start talking real money in China.

I'm not sure this is particularly enlightened thinking.

My company does personnel evaluations at the end of each year. Everyone ranks all their coworkers, with no exceptions.

Our staff includes people from over ten countries. The evaluations can be completed in Mandarin or English, but the questions are the same. In addition to evaluating those around you, you also have to evaluate yourself.

The biggest reason to have self-evaluations is for people to see if their personal evaluations match up to how others perceive them. It's basically to cut down on people having wildly out-of-sync thoughts about themselves. If you know about your own weaknesses you'll be less likely to make gross errors of judgement from your ignorance.

- Chinese people think they're great, Taiwanese people think they might kinda be doing ok

With executives from Taiwan, China and the US, which two groups do you think would share the most values? I suppose most people would assume this is a silly question, one hardly worth even asking. Of course, Chinese and Taiwanese people are going to be the most similar, right? They've got a common language and both come from the same stock. Americans, on other hand, have a completely different culture, foreign to both China and Taiwan.

Well, this didn't exactly turn out to be the case.

The Americans, (and most of the other staff who weren't from China or Taiwan) who operate in a culture that is constantly stressing self-confidence, predictably rated themselves extremely well in their evaluations. They were similarly confident they made important contributions to the business. If we were to use grades, nearly all of them gave themselves A's. Translating this to bonuses, they clearly expected nothing but the most generous packages.

The Taiwanese, on the other hand, were nothing if not your typical Taiwanese: traditional, humble, and low-key. Most gave themselves a B or a B+. Even the best managers rated themselves this way.

So what about the Chinese? Owing to their gigantic market and rabid competition, the Chinese managers ended up with the same levels of confidence as the Americans. Every single one gave themselves an A or an A+.

- Fight 'em in the streets, fight 'em in the jungle

So at their core, the Americans and Chinese turned out to be the most alike. It was as if the Taiwanese were from a completely foreign culture with its own distinct ways of thinking and acting.

With this in mind, does it make sense for anyone to use their experience in Taiwan to start to do business in China? Are Taiwan's potatoes simply too small to be relevant for the giant markets of China and the US? In China and the US, you've got classic guerilla warfare. The competition between businesses is just as fierce as it is between people looking for work. People are spread out everywhere and the battlelines stretch on for miles. Strategy, tactics and positioning are all like nothing we have in Taiwan. The keys to success in this kind of fighting are your ability to adapt appropriately and think about the bigger picture.

Taiwan, on the other hand, is basically a niche market. Instead of fighting it out in the jungles, we're throwing punches in the streets. We're like a cop movie where you know the crime is going to be solved by the end of the film. Every quick turn, attack or block assumes an enormous weight as it might prove crucial to how the story ends. As a business In Taiwan, you might be sitting pretty in Taipei and be able to earn a pretty penny that way. But everyone knows once you leave the city limits you must as well be facing a different planet. In comparison, you have the situation multiplied by a million in China. There you have to think about every city and every province. You've got to think about the different regions and everything else in between.

- Original recipe vs. catering to the locals

I know you're thinking, "What about all those businesspeople from Taiwan who already went to China and were successful?" If we look hard at the big and successful business in China run by Taiwanese businesspeople, like Want Want and Ting Hsin, we see that they don't resemble anything we have in Taiwan. Calling these Taiwanese businesses means nothing more than the owners were born in Taiwan or that some of the senior and technical staff come from Taiwan.

The idea of replicating a successful business experience from Taiwan in China is just something I've never seen or heard of. Keep in mind that this applies mostly to operations and strategy. With their dedication and professionalism, Taiwanese people are sure to be your greatest asset, wherever they are. That's what you should keep in mind, not the idea of simple and clean replication.

- Island culture and Continentalism

So, what have we learned? Success in Taiwan in no way guarantees easy success in China. I can think of almost nothing but examples of people who tried to copy what they did in Taiwan in China and failed. Horribly.

After decades of separation, a common language and common past doesn't mean much. We just don't think the same way anymore. We've got that much-discussed "island culture," round here and they just don't have it there.

For us, the way we think about China needs to be the way we think about the US. But, of course, that will require a certain amout of rebooting as well. We still have tons of Taiwanese people who go to America and treat it like a magical land where they're barely fit to shine people's shoes. And when they step foot in China they feel ten feet tall. They set up shop in China in their own little insular communities and barely speak a word to anyone else, whether it be in their business or personal lives. If we see more failures over there don't say I never said how to stop it.