Product Description

This book, by East-West marketing consultant Chin-ning Chu, is must reading for any Westerner in business, government, or academia who negotiates in the Orient or wants to.

It is the first to reveal to Westerners the deep secrets of the Asian psyche that influence Asian behavior in business, politics, lifestyle, and battle.

Ms. Chu points out that Asian mind games have become so finely tuned over the centuries that Americans seldom realize that Asians view the marketplace (and by extension, the world) as a battlefield, and act accordingly.

She has extracted the principles of successful negotiations from centuries-old Chinese texts that have influenced all of Asia, and provides her readers with examples of their application in the modern world.

In the Western world, the ability to formulate cunning and subtle strategies for getting your own way in business, politics, and everyday life is regarded as a matter of intuition. In Asia, however, strategic thinking is a formal discipline studied by people from all walks of life. Amazing as it may seem, contemporary Asians base their outlook and behavior on the teachings of the ancients. In China, even children are familiar with the "36 Strategies," formulated by Sun Tzu, a famous military strategist, in the fourth century B.C.

Throughout Asia today, business people as well as political figures study Sun Tzu's Art of War and apply its strategies to all their activities, while Americans read The One-Minute Manager and All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten. No wonder, Ms. Chu comments, that when it comes to business and political negotiations, the Chinese refer to Americans with a word that means "innocent children."

Ms. Chu brilliantly analyses how Chinese thought and culture have affected Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and how Japanese conquest and culture have had their effect on the rest of Asia.

With United States trade and political alliances shifting increasingly to the Pacific rim, it becomes ever more urgent to understand the Asian mind. Ms. Chu, born in China and educated in Taiwan, spells out the makeup of the Asian psyche as no Westerner could.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163658 in Books
• Published on: 1991-01-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
John Hillkirk USA Today: coauthor of Grit, guts and Genius; and Xerox: American Samurai. Western business people often are at an enormous disadvantage because they don't understand Eastern philosophy or strategy. Chin-ning Chu's book is a fascinating and revealing look at the Asian mind-set. Every manager doing business in the Far East -- or negotiating with Asian executives -- could learn from this book. -- Review

Review
John Hillkirk

USA Today: coauthor of Grit, guts and Genius; and Xerox: American Samurai.

Western business people often are at an enormous disadvantage because they don't understand Eastern philosophy or strategy. Chin-ning Chu's book is a fascinating and revealing look at the Asian mind-set. Every manager doing business in the Far East -- or negotiating with Asian executives -- could learn from this book.

About the Author
Chin-Ning Chu is president of Asian Marketing Consultants, Inc. She counsels Western companies doing or wishing to do business in Asia. Born in Teinjin, near Beijing, she was raised in Taiwan after the fall of mainland China to the Communists. She has studied the teachings of sages in India, China, and Europe and believes her study of philosophy and psychology provides her with a powerful tool with which to examine the complexities of philosophical, sociological, and historical influences on the shaping of the modern Asian mind. Ms. Chu lives in Beaverton, Oregon.

Customer Reviews

Flawed but helpful
Yes, the book is unsubtle, as some reviewers have complained. And the stereotypes are exaggerated. They're also a bit dated, since the book was written in 1991 -- before China's private economy had blossomed, before Taiwan and Korea had become such important high-tech centers, and before Japan went bust.

The book also sensationalizes the degree to which people may be trying to deceive you, and the degree to which this deceit is based on your being a Westerner. Often the deceit, when it happens, is just a cultural way of dealing with embarrassment.

But when I was a beginner with Asia, I found this book a helpful eye-opener. I'd never heard of "The 36 Stratagems", which another reviewer calls tedious (this was before Asian video games based on Chinese military classics became popular here). It turned out that just about all educated East Asian people I met, men and women, knew them to some degree. The book also describes some relevant differences among East Asian cultures - a cure for the usual Western point of view that lumps Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and others all into one "Asian" category.

By now, most of my time in the past 9-10 years has been spent involved with East Asia and East Asian people. This has been at both a business and personal level, including through marriage and working for a Japanese company. From that perspective, I can also say the book's lack of political correctness and its hype about military strategy are kind of virtues.

How? On its surface, the book is about Asian-Western interactions. But underneath, the book illustrates a lot about how people from different Asian cultures regard each other, both cross-culturally and intraculturally.

Chairman Mao may have used the phrase "politically correct" from time to time, but in its current form it's a Western concept, and a recent one at that. It's also something that comes easier to the lips than to the heart or mind. My friends from Asian countries are usually more direct -- they often express quite stereotypical (and negative) views about people from neighboring countries, even when they make exceptions for individuals. More than once has some really balanced or sweet person mentioned to me after a pause, "But you know, I really can't stand people from X."

Business practices and politics often can be pretty manipulative even against colleagues within the same company. (Watch just about any Japanese TV drama about office life, if you don't have a chance to experience the real thing.) And I've run into plenty of East Asian managers and executives who think they're great strategists in the style of the Chinese classics, even though in fact they're about as clumsy as you or I would be.

Read this book with a grain of salt. But you can definitely benefit from having read it.

Go see Austin Powers instead
OK, this is NOT a recommended title, but I couldn't resistsaying a few words about it here because of its high entertainmentvalue. For 15 years now I have consulted for US companies entering the Japanese market. So naturally I paid close attention to the chapters on Japan. They were very entertaining. They read like the script from a Mr Bad Guy in a 007 movie... Check out the prose, too: "A Japanese samurai worker produces in one day what it takes an American worker two days to produce. To the western world the Japanese stress the importance of free trade because they know that the western worker is no match for the Japanese samurai worker" (p. 125). .. The final section contains precious specific advice such as "respect local culture" and "develop long term objectives". One of the deepest pieces of timeless advise is that "if you drop your chopstick in Asia it means good luck". I guarantee you won't know a thing about doing business in Japan after reading this book, but you may be amused reading it. ... it seems that a ticket to Austin Powers may represent better value. END

Perpetuation of myth and stereotype
With books like this purporting to explain Asia and its people, it is little wonder that the average Westerner is still so misinformed on the subject. Contrary to what the title says, she is not "unlocking any hidden agenda". The fact is, this is well-charted territory, much of which is covered in books millenia-old (Art of War). Another problem with the title is that she is not providing any "survival" advice. She simply shows how Asians operate and negotiate without showing the best way to counter their tactics. Reading this book to learn how to deal with Asians is like studying martial arts to learn how to get beat up. But perhaps the worst quality of the book is the way she imbues each passage with the sense that Westerners shouldn't even bother trying to understand Asia. (Certianly they shouldn't bother learning from her.) In one section she even states explicitly that there are two types of Westerner in Asia -- 1) the Asia-phile who thinks he knows alot but doesn't and 2) the novice who realizes that he knows nothing. But hey, here is the real "secret agenda" of some Asians: when a teacher tells her students that they are still ignorant, the students exalt her as one of the few enlightened ones to whom they can turn. They become dependent on the teacher for her pearls of "wisdom", each one poisoned with the idea that student is ignorant.