When in China, No Green Hats.doc

When in China, No Green HatsCraig S. SmithShanghai: A Washington State agriculture official who was touring China a few years ago handed out bright green baseball caps at every stop without noticing that none of the men would put them on or that all the women were giggling.Finally, a Chinese-American in the delegation took the man aside and informed him that to wear a green hat is the Chinese symbol of a cuckold.It is the bane of the business traveler in an unfamiliar culture: making a comment or gesture that is meant to be friendly but that offends or embarrasses the hosts. Mocking a man's masculinity is only one of the inadvertent slights that visiting corporate executives and government officials can make in China that serve to emphasize the cultural gaps they are trying hard to minimize.Happily, such cross-cultural faux pas are no longer deal killers. Globalization has narrowed the cultural divide, and these days the Chinese are experienced enough in dealing with foreigners to shrug off indiscretions. Even stabbing chopsticks into a bowl of rice and leaving them there (an act of hostility among Chinese because it signifies death) would be laughed off (nervously) by locals unless it was done with obvious intent. What really matters is a friendly attitude and a patient manner.Even so, the worst gaffes still leave a bad impression and the right gestures still earn respect.One rule of thumb understands the Chinese worldview. Don St. Pierre Jr., who has spent his adult life doing business in China, recalls a Canadian winemaker telling Chinese reporters in Shanghai that he expected his "ultrapremium" wine to do well in China because it had done well in Japan and the two cultures had so much in common.Resentment of Japan runs very deep in China, particularly in Shanghai, which was bombed and occupied by the Japanese during World War II. The Chinese regard Japan's culture as derivative of their own far more ancient traditions and bristle at Japanese notions of superiority.St. Pierre nudged the winemaker beneath the table, but by the time the man had stopped speaking, the room was quiet enough to hear a Champagne bubble burst. The damage had been done, St. Pierre said, even though the wine-maker had hired an expensive international public relations firm to brief him on what he should and should not say. "Which shows how useful that advice can be," St. Pierre added.Duncan Clark, a consultant based in Beijing, says locally hired secretaries are generally a better first line of defense for multinationals. He recalled that during his days at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, the firm ordered expensive clocks to give as gifts commemorating the closing of a deal. The firm's local staff caught the mistake: to "give a clock” in Chinese sounds the same as "Seeing someone off to his end."With thousands of years of accumulated cultural snippets to sift through, an outsider cannot hope to catch every potential pitfall. The Chinese language is filled with embarrassing puns and unlucky homonyms that at best can cause snickers behind a foreigner's back.Besides clocks, giving umbrellas is taboo because doing so is homonymous with a phrase that means the person's family will be dispersed. Books, too, are unlucky presents because "giving a book" sounds the same as "delivering defeat."China's many dialects multiply the risks. Shanghai natives chuckle at Va Bene, an expensive Italian restaurant that recently opened in town, because the Italian name meaning, "it goes well” sounds like Shanghainese for "not cheap."Color is another cue that can send an unintended message. One multinational company giving gifts from Tiffany replaced the white ribbons on the jeweler's famous robin's-egg blue boxes with red ribbons after the company's Shanghai employees pointed out that white in China signifies death, while red is lucky and is used for celebrations.Picking numbers for everything from product prices to telephones is also tricky. Avoid 4, a homonym for death in Chinese, and load up on 8s, a number that is pronounced the same as "Making money" in the southern Cantonese dialect.But even an experienced Sinologist like Clark was mystified when his Beijing workers objected to pricing a product at 250 yuan. It turned out that in northern China, calling someone "50"is to say the person is nuts.Clark's confusion illustrates the regional diversity of cultural quirks in a country as big as China. In the south, people tap two fingers on the table to say thanks, but people in the north might think the gesture is just a nervous tic.On the other hand, a few generalizations apply across Asia. Most seasoned business travelers from the United States and Europe caught on long ago to the tradition of indulging in small talk and meandering toward the main point rather than getting down to business right away.They have also come to appreciate the importance of "face" in Asian societies. Scott Seligman, author of "Chinese Busi。