In view of the emergence of a global economy, the increase of foreign investment inChina and the promise of China's admission into the WTO, at no time in history has there been so great a need for international negotiating skills
Domestically, the study of negotiation usually focuses on the strategic dimension of the negotiation process and discussions concentrate on business relationships between the concerned parties, tactics, bargaining strategies, contingency positions, and so on However, what makes someone a good negotiator in one culture may not work well in another. Negotiation rules and practices may differ greatly across cultures People tend to interpret and judge their negotiating opponents on the basis of their own cultural assumption, and very often an opponent "who thinks differemly" will be considered as someone "who thinks wrongly". The potential for misperception and misunderstanding is immense. The greater the cultural differences, the greater the barriers to communication, and the more likely failure of the negotiation To negotiate successfully, cultural differences between the concerned parties must be identified and bridged.
My thesis is a comparative study of the different types of negotiating style of China and several major Western countries. I am not so much interested in describing how' these negotiating styles differ as in investigating why they differ. There are many factors contributing to a certain type of negotiating style, but cultural system may be one of the most important. I intend to analyze the underlying cultural factors that give rise to a distinct type of negotiating style, or put it in another way, the causal relation between a culture and a certain type of negotiating style. The objective is to improve the knowledge and understanding of relevant negotiation-related cultural differences and offer some recommendations for Chinese negotiators......

Table of Contents
Introduction ................................... 1
Chapter 1 How Negotiations Work: An Overview ....................................... 3
1.1 Negotiation ................................ 3
1.2 Basic Elements of the Negotiation Process ...................................... 5
Chapter 2 Culture's Impacts on Negotiation ................................... 12
2.1 Culture Defined ....................................... I2
2.2 Culture and the Group ........................................ 15
2.3 General Influence of Culture on Business Negotiations ...... 17
Chapter 3 Chinese and Western Negotiating Styles: A Cross-cultural Perspective ................................ 19
3. I Negotiating Goals ....................................... 20
3.2 Attitudes toward Negotiation ................................. 24
3.3 Personal Style ........................................ 26
3.4 Communication ............................ 29
3.5 Sensitivity to Time ......................................... 33
3.6 Emotionalism ............................. 37
3.7 Form of Agreement ....................... 40
3.8 Agreement Building Process ............... 44
3.9 Team Organization ....................... 45
3.10 Willingness to Take Risks .............. 46
Chapter 4 Conclusion and Recommendations for Chinese Negotiators ................................. 47
Reference ................................... 53

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