Q & A Table of Contents
How Can I Deal With Chinese Tactics?
From: Meng, Melbourne, Australia
Question: I need some advice on how to counter Chinese negotiation tactics and strategies. For example, the Chinese often uses the 36 strategems and The Art Of War (Sun Tsu). For example, "killing with a borrowed knife". How do you counterattack or defend yourself from this strategy?
Response: The most important element of your response to such strategies is to anticipate and understand them. In your example of "killing with a borrowed knife" you are talking about one party using another party's strategy, tactics, or strengths in a pre-emptive manner to turn their advantage into one of your own. If you understand the tactical approaches another party is likely to use, or actually uses in a negotiation, you will not be surprised and you can think of substantive responses to their strategy.
You can also take a very different approach, not as an alternative but rather as a complement to the idea of needing to understand them. You need to develop your own negotiation strategy based on a philosophy or set of ethical standards with which you are most comfortable. While in ancient times people waged war to determine who was right -- the winner, if you will -- we now recognize that war is fundamentally destructive of every participant.
A negotiation which yields a winner and a loser is a failed negotiation. The 'loser' is going to walk away grumbling, "If they think I'm going to fulfill my part of the deal, they're going to have to drag me kicking and screaming through the process." There's an old expression in the USA: "If you cheat me once, shame on you. If you cheat me twice, shame on me." Negotiating is not an alternative form of warfare, rather it is a full-blown substitute for the combative approach for solving problems.
If other parties insist on negotiating using outmoded competitive negotiation strategies, make it clear that you are not interested in a one-sided outcome. Unless the parties to a negotiation reach a mutually-agreed solution to which each is genuinely committed, the process was unsuccessful. You can say to folks relying on "The Art of War", "If you persist in using that approach, I am afraid we may fail to reach agreement." Since failure means a loss of an opportunity to gain, they may realize that competition is not the appropriate direction to take. Negotiation by formula only works when the circumstances fit the particular formula. For negotiation to succeed, people need to accept that unless both sides are comfortable with both the process and the results, bullying tactics may win the battle but will lose the war.
Good luck,
Steve
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