Seligman Online

SeligmanOnline

China

My career as a "China hand" began with a summer of Mandarin lessons, followed by two years of English teaching in Taiwan in the 1970s. After the U.S. and PRC established diplomatic relations in 1979, I worked in China in two stints totaling five years. Add my Taiwan and Hong Kong years and that's eight years all together.
Tangible evidence of my love affair with the Chinese can be found in the books I've written about them. My fascination has been with cultural differences and strategies and tactics for effective cross-cultural communication.

Catch Flies With Honey. Now that China is South Korea's largest trading partner, there's a good deal of China fever going around in Seoul these days. So much so, apparently, that Chinese Business Etiquette now has a Korean audience, and its own Korean edition! The title translates loosely as "Catch Flies with Honey, Not Vinegar." Why a people who have shared a border and deep cultural ties with China for thousands of years feel the need for instruction in matters like "face" from an American Jewish boy is not entirely clear to me, but far be it from me to argue with the extra income.
For more about China, click here.

Dealing With the Chinese. My first effort at explaining the Chinese to foreigners did pretty well in the marketplace, despite being published just a month before the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. A British edition came out a year later. Chinese Business Etiquette, published in 1999, is the heir to Dealing With the Chinese. I revisited the subject after three years back in China, because so much had changed and my understanding of the Chinese people had deepened.