Guanxi, Berkshire’s new China letter, is a monthly mentor and coach, bringing you the knowledge you need to become a new, twenty-first-century China hand. A subscription to Guanxi offers a front-row seat at the drama of China’s transition to world superpower. It provides the practical knowledge every professional needs in this new era, along with an inside look at culture and customs, history and economics, news and views. In every monthly issue, the old China hands of Guanxi—business leaders, educators, historians, economists, and anthropologists—offer you the connections and perspectives you’ll need today, and tomorrow. And there’s fun stuff, too, like movies and chatspeak, from the new China. See our Editorial Calendar for 2006-7.
Guanxi: The China Letter is a premium source of information about China and Chinese perspectives. In each month’s twelve informative, quick-reading pages, you will:
- Find out that much of what you hear and read about China just isn't true
- Discover what today's China hands have to say, and learn from their experience
- Get a balanced perspective on Chinese politics, history, and culture from expert contributors
- Learn what leading companies in the China trade are doing
- Be kept abreast of critical international trends and find out what’s on the horizon
- Prepare yourself to develop strong relationships—and guanxi—with Chinese colleagues, partners, and customers
- Learn about films, books, and courses that will help you understand China—and have fun in the bargain
- Read about key predictors of success in China
- Gain insights, fun facts, and words of Chinese to use right away
What’s different about Guanxi?
Guanxi provides graduate-level training in Chinese history and culture as well as practical guidance on working with Chinese agencies and individuals. Its pages, written by experts on all aspects of China, are packed with lessons and suggestions that will help readers prepare for a future in which China will have significant influence on their business. Some readers will be working in China; others will be preparing to launch ventures there. Every issue explores how Chinese values and perspectives influence relationships between China and the rest of the world.
Guanxi goes deeper than newspaper reporting or books on doing business in China. It provides the background readers need when they read the Wall Street Journal or the Economist. It offers insights into Chinese culture and history as well as sophisticated political and economic analysis. There is up-to-date information on social issues. It also covers China's relations with other countries and regions, as well as Chinese perspectives on the United States. A regular language column helps readers develop proficiency in Chinese language and writing.
Why is Guanxi: The China Letter needed?
Guanxi goes far beyond simple rules about, for example, how to handle a business card (in case you don’t know: never stick it in your pocket, examine it carefully and handle it respectfully). It goes beyond the basics found in tourist guidebooks and business books to explain how the Chinese think about things and what they value. Not just what they’re doing but why they are doing it, and why they think they are doing it. That is, Berkshire focuses on How and Why, not just Who, What, and When.
Western-educated people generally know very little about China, not even basic place names or landmarks. Contrast this with our knowledge of Europe, which we know through popular culture as well as through novels, textbooks, and movies. We’ve heard of Budapest and the Danube, we know that Dresden was bombed, and we recognize the Eiffel Tower and the Rock of Gibraltar. Most of us also know at least a smattering of a second European language in addition to our native tongue. But popular wisdom says that Chinese is too difficult to learn.
Suddenly our careers require us to work with the Chinese and in China itself, and we realize just how sketchy our knowledge actually is. Take something as basic as food. We extrapolate from our slight knowledge, mostly of restaurants offering southern Chinese dishes, and when someone leaves for China, we say, “You’ll get sick of eating rice!” And yet many Chinese eat little or no rice.
Educated Chinese, on the other hand, grow up knowing about the United States and Europe. They are familiar with Mozart and Beethoven, with Michelangelo and Van Gogh, and well as with Michael Jordan and Britney Spears. That unbalance in cultural familiarity was perhaps acceptable in the past, when business was generally conducted on our ground and our terms. But today we need to be ready to study and travel and do business in China, on Chinese ground and Chinese terms. To do that, we need more than a few phrases or quick tips. We need an education in the world’s oldest continuous civilization, in a culture that is rich, complex, and increasingly influential.
John Thornton, former co-president of Goldman Sachs and professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, put it this way: “The single greatest need, certainly in [the United States], and probably in the world, is education for the elites about Chinese history. The basic facts just aren’t known.” Guanxi should allay the anxiety that many people admit to having about China by getting to the source of the problem—people’s lack of knowledge. Every issue of Guanxi will make readers better informed about Chinese history and culture, providing essential context for understanding the issues of today and the challenges they face in their professional lives and collegial relationships. Over time, in addition to the newsletter, we’ll be adding webinars, a book club, courses, and conferences to bring our audience an even deeper, more complete understanding of China.
A chance to learn from old China hands
When we talk to experts about Guanxi, they surprise me with their enthusiasm. They are bothered by the superficiality of China reporting, and because of their long years of work with and in China, they know how much there is to absorb and understand. They are tired of the focus on economic issues without awareness of the related cultural and social issues. They are also tired of coverage that just lauds or denounces China. Anyone who really knows China knows that both tendencies oversimplify a complex reality, and they worry about the dangers of unbridled optimism as well as unreasonable hostility.
We have also found that Chinese people, in China and outside it, are immensely pleased by the idea that we are going to present the Chinese perspective (or, as they have said to me, “our viewpoint”). And those with Chinese-Western ties—the 40,000 graduates of Beijing University living in the United States, for example—-are delighted by the idea of a publication that aims at balanced coverage and increasing people’s understanding in order to build ties of friendship and mutual benefit.
Guanxi takes a global perspective. U.S. coverage too often focuses on China and the United States alone; although that relationship is extremely important and merits considerable attention, the world is a big place, and China is exerting global influence. We cover China’s relations with other Asian nations, with Europe and the nations of Oceania, and its involvement in Africa and Latin America.
We have a larger mission, too. We encourage a sense of social responsibility and volunteerism. As Ruth Hayhoe, a contributor to our second issue, put it, we will emphasize “the need for individuals to give back to their communities, to add to the collective force of social responsibility and action so critical to our mutual futures.”
Why title our newsletter Guanxi?
Karen Christensen, the publisher of Guanxi: The China Letter, explains:
Choosing a Chinese word for our title was a risky decision. Some people said it was a big mistake: readers wouldn’t be able to pronounce it, and it would scare them away. But the point of publishing Guanxi is to make Western people more comfortable with Chinese ideas and culture and to encourage them to get to know China from the inside—by traveling there, reading popular books and watching films, and developing familiarity with China and Chinese people.
Guanxi is usually translated as “relationship” or “connection” and sometimes as “network” or “sphere of influence” in an attempt to capture the concept’s sense of reciprocity and mutual obligation. It’s been gratifying to see, as we’ve prepared for the launch of the project, how our staff and colleagues have cottoned on to the idea of guanxi and seen that this kind of relationship building is really part of the experience of many of us already. A Scottish colleague working in the Netherlands wrote, “Thinking about it, this is all about a ‘global guanxi’ . . . Connecting with people with some common ground; not necessarily where you come from, but where you've been—and with whom—at certain stages in your life/career/travels.” Curiously, I’d lost touch with this friend, my boss at my first London publishing job, for twenty-five years, and met again only recently. He’s been a help with contacts for Guanxi: The China Letter, too.
Guanxi sometimes has negative implications, too, of an “old boys’ network” and even of bribery and kickbacks. A couple of decades ago it was see as somewhat sleazy, not something that should be part of a modern, egalitarian culture. But in today’s China, guanxi is recognized as essential to doing business and to getting along and enjoying life there. It is a familiar concept elsewhere in Asia, too, and today is accepted as a part of doing business, with Western parallels in both personal behavior and now in our collaborative and networking technologies.