China’s impressing economic growth and enormous market is attracting more and more foreign companies to do business in this country. Denmark is no exception. China is one of the most important foreign export markets to Denmark. Chinese entrepreneurs are also expending their range of activities abroad and they are quite interested to do it in Denmark. This signifies the increasing business interactions and negotiation is a crucial factor when doing business, especially internationally. When negotiating internationally, the attention to cross-cultural differences is also essential. The concept of culture and its values are fundamental to the cross-cultural discussions. However, nothing is static. Culture as well. China’s opening up to the world and letting in foreign businesses and lifestyles puts its culture in the risk to be globalised and more emancipated.
In this thesis the possible cultural change in Chinese culture has been taken into account and the importance of stereotypical cultural values of guanxi, renqing and mianzi, and the thirty-six stratagems in today’s Sino-Danish negotiations has been analysed.
This study show that while cultural values of guanxi and renqing are not of a significant importance, mianzi is quite important and is considered with cautiousness in Sino-Danish negotiations in the case of participating companies. On the other hand, the decrease of importance of the thirty-six stratagems in the negotiations with the Chinese has been proven.
Keywords: culture, cultural change, guanxi, renqing, mianzi, negotiation, the thirty-six stratagems.