The symbolic character of Chinese language implies that all messages have multiple intentions--at least a direct or literal intention, and a symbolic one. This multi-level mindset extends to exchanges we do not ordinarily consciously think of as a negotiation or communication--for instance, to gifts.

Gifts, when you think about it, are probably one of the oldest forms of negotiating. Even great ape tribes engage in such exchanges. When it comes to the Chinese, gifts given in the negotiating process, whether they be simple things like refreshment in the form of lichee and chestnuts together (suggesting cunning), or works of art (which can carry very complex symbolic overhead), provide much information to the Chinese position that typically passes right over the heads of Western negotiators.

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A picture of a mountain with clouds and water can portend positive attitudes in the negotiation, while one showing a plain without water may suggest that serious problems remain in the negotiation process. Westerners receiving either gift would probably respond positively, but their Chinese counterparts would view the Westerners' responses to the two pictures quite differently.

In brief, Chinese typically provide crucial information symbolically through gifts, or apparently meaningless aphorisms that visually or aurally "pun" the direct information. In a society where family and associates are crucially responsible for the mistakes of their members, such indirection both protects "face" yet requires the hearer to participate in the assertion by making the connection.

The problems faced in addressing Chinese linguistic and cultural symbolism are far greater than my simple examples have thus far suggested. For example, while Eberhard has identified some four hundred national symbols, each with multiple contexts, he asserts that his list is far from comprehensive. The use of regional and local symbolism and of dialectic puns underscores that symbolism is used even within China to create local transfer of information and intention virtually imperceptible to outsiders. The symbolic language provides information to members of the group, using words that have substantially different meaning or are meaningless to the outsiders. Even when using Mandarin, the "national dialect," only members of the local community are likely to be familiar with dialectic puns unique to their region, and will add the symbolic information of the local dialect to both the symbolism and raw information of the national language. Symbolic language then at one level informs insiders at the expense of outsiders.

But the symbolic language, inherent to Chinese thought, also is intended to inform outsiders. Chinese will go to great lengths in attempting to symbolically inform outsiders in ways that they cannot within their culture, appropriately inform directly. Outsiders, particularly Westerners, whose language is directly informational, frequently miss this symbolic information. In the early 1970s, Chairman Mao tried to let the American government know that he was inclined towards rapprochement after American bombing attacks on North Vietnamese hideouts in Cambodia by having the American Author, Edgar Snow, stand beside him on the reviewing platform during celebrations for the twenty-first anniversary of the founding of the the People's Republic of China. American officials missed the signal until China again indirectly suggested it two months later in a message sent to Henry Kissenger by way of the Pakistani government.

Crucial information, especially that which might cause loss of face if not successfully responded to, will invariably be sent indirectly rather than directly. Frequently the information will, at least initially, be provided in symbolic form. Understanding Chinese symbolism in real time would do much to level the negotiating tables with China and advantage Western negotiators over less informed counterparts.

Furthermore Chinese symbolism is invariably context specific providing sometimes significantly different meanings in different contexts. The gift of an apple (pingwo) to a friend or adversary can symbolize "peace" (ping), but given to an invalid it may be taken to mean approving of the illness (bing). Apricots as gifts may symbolize a wish that the recipient have many male offspring since "bai-guo-z" or white fruit and "bai-ge zi" or hundred sons are puns. But a gift or presentation of red apricots suggests the married woman involved is having an affair. Symbolism in the gifts presented in the stories told and in the topics of discussion can all inform the sophisticated observer. But to fully understand the symbolism the observer must be assimilated into the culture itself. Since the culture subtly shifts in different regions, only the insider speaks or hears the language completely.

A computer data base of the common symbolic meanings of Chinese gifts, words and actions would provide westerners an approach to real time insights to the symbolic component of Chinese language that traditionally has made the Chinese inscrutable to Westerners.

More importantly, aural information in both native Mandarin and the local dialect, could be translated and/or transcribed for the non-Chinese speaking wearer of the Star Trek type translator mentioned above. Both visual and linguistic puns could be presented on screen, and contextual implications suggested. A businessman wearing sophisticated equipment could enter into cross-cultural negotiations with tools unheard of previously. Miniature sensors could observe his counterpart's biological and linguistic communications, providing him with output in real time. A database of symbolic meanings would provide insights into the negotiation process currently unavailable to any Westerner except those who have actually assimilated Chinese culture.

Yet, even forearmed with a computer providing visual and aural information to the wearer of a Gordi Laforgian type eye screen, limitations to East-West negotiations remain. Both the cultural nature of negotiations and the specifics of China's symbolic traditions place limits on the usefulness of miniature computer "translators." And beyond the quality of the machines brought to the negotiations, what of the quality of the negotiators--the quickness of their intelligences, the compatibility of their personalities?

Sometimes it's better not to know.

Even in Star Trek, technology merely provides a tool to enable some cross-cultural communication. It does not dictate the message itself. As we gauge the Star Trek promise, it is interesting to note that the translation technology and cross-cultural information had limits even in the TV version of reality--often purposeful limits. Herein lies one of the subtle sharp edges of the many-edged sword of true understanding.

The nature of "dealing" is compromise. Even in the most ideal state of affairs, negotiations result, not in the ideal, but in the doable. Both sides enthusiastically spin the results in their favor, when neither side may view the agreement to be in their complete best interest. Negotiations permit what can be done rather than what ought to be done from either point of view, and politically it is frequently better to create the illusion that what can be done is ideal, rather than acknowledge that it is the lesser of evils. Yes, the old "saving of face" ploy, which is a mechanism shared by most humans. Somehow, losing on the symbolically deep battlefield, but maintaining a win at the surface, is itself a lesser of evils.

But how does one lie while using a "total translation" device?

Virtual translating devices may not easily allow this saving of face. For one thing, the simple act of strapping negotiating parties into lie detector machinery would likely hinder the development of any relationship! Even if the degree of accuracy of the translation is adjustable, knowing that total "truth-in-translation" is possible, how would you first negotiate the degree of truth to be utilized in such intermediated transactions?

Frequently, particularly in Chinese culture, but certainly also in the West, negotiators follow their sense of duty rather than their feelings. This adherence to duty can be stressful. Too much information about the feelings of ones counterparts may hinder the focus on the doable, leading to increased breakdowns in the negotiation processes. One stands to lose the admitted utility of lies and half-truths as bridges to eventual, mutually-acceptable settlement.

Sometimes knowing is not enough.

While the knowledge and insights that computational translations might provide to east-west negotiations are tremendous, there remains a cultural divide which externally-processed knowledge may never overcome. We fuzzily refer to this uncommunicatable phenomenon as "state of mind."

No spoken, written nor "body language" translation will adequately represent the same state of mind--even between parties who do speak the same language. How much greater a difference is possible between people of different nations--or planets!

A contract written in Chinese, no matter how clearly written, will entertain differing interpretations from the "same" contract written in English. Even the most direct translation will both lose American concepts and gain Chinese concepts in the translation process--gains and losses which are usually unintended. Chinese is a subtle language and its nuances can suggest or inform the culturally literate Chinese in ways that will never be clear to the native English speaker.

. Recently [South China Morning Post for July 19, 2001] during a pilot labor action against Cathay Pacific, the airlines fired forty-nine pilots. To the typical Westerner, that was the story. But those who spoke Cantonese, the local dialect, learned much more than Western newscasters. "Forty-nine," in Cantonese, spoken with subtle tonal differences, is almost homonymous to "dead dog." The airline was sending a message of scornful rejection of the pilots' arguments that outsiders might not notice amidst its otherwise conciliatory tone. That message, while not directly phrased, was clearly meant to be heard. Frequently the real message in Chinese is not contained in the words expressed, but in the subtle aural and visual puns and homonyms of those words. Many a western product has failed in China, not because of the product, but because it was marketed under a brand name translation which unwittingly carried subtle negative connotations. .

Chinese language is both a visual and aural art. Spoken Mandarin phonemes can be delivered with from one to a combination of four tones. They are hard to distinguish during rapid conversation, even for a facile listener, and frequently meaning is determined as much by context as by tone, although proper meaning is determined solely by tone. A computer database could certainly reduce the number of misunderstandings, but it is not likely that a computer could provide a negotiator with the proper response for the information provided him. The new technology could guide and inform the communication, but it could not be a substitute for it along the lines of the virtual negotiator process suggested earlier in this paper.

Spatial and Temporal Limits to Virtual Negotiations

Ends and Beginnings

In some episodes of Star Trek, The Next Generation, members of the Enterprise crew resort to virtual worlds in which they interact with holographic counterparts of their own creation. In some crucial aspects, such holographic counterparts are now possible. Wearing an audio and video transceiver-equipped headset and surrounded by appropriate sensors, one can now enter a software-generated or -augmented virtual world and interact with computer-generated virtual counterparts.

Attempts are in progress to develop computer programs which translate complex cultural and linguistic phenomena from one cultural milieu to another. Negotiators, rather than facing each other, might soon face virtual counterparts whose translated words and actions would reflect the culture with which each negotiator is familiar. Yet, perversely, this virtual negotiating interface itself reflects a Western style bias to the concept of the negotiating process.

Western negotiations typically take place across a negotiating table. This is the spatial location of the negotiation. Written agenda listing specific issues are addressed sequentially. At the end of the sequence is... well, the end. This is the temporal aspect of the negotiation.

To the Westerner, the negotiation is taking place in the here and now. The language is direct and process oriented. For the Easterner, much of the negotiation will be continued elsewhere within a more extensive group. The table is not the site of the whole negotiation process, even at its "conclusion," for, in a sense, the negotiation is never over. The concluding agreement does not constitute an end, but a beginning. Where a Westerner may see success in the short term as important, to the Easterner, success will be measured on a stage with a far longer lifespan.

Westernized and Chinatized

While one could undoubtedly develop a negotiating interface where the American negotiator would directly confront his counterpart's Americanized interface, while his Chinese counterpart would calmly sip tea with a "Chinatized" virtual Western negotiator, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine the "resolutions" experienced by each person or team, 100% matching up in reality. It is not possible, through mere database translations alone--no matter how complexly rich the data--to synthesize the spirit in which negotiations are ultimately taken.

Yet understanding these differences is essential to successful negotiation with the Chinese.

In fact, Western business negotiators frequently face real world equivalents of just such a proposed virtual negotiator, in the form of a Chinese negotiating team. Chinese negotiating teams are highly structured, often have little more responsibility than to set forth acceptable constraints. The lead negotiator may not even be the crucial decision maker in the negotiating team. The team may be just a bridge to the real decision making groups, which may not be present at all.

This does not seem too different, on the face of it, from Western negotiating teams, sent by a Stateside headquarters to accomplish initial negotiations. The difference becomes significant during what Westerners would call the "final stage of negotiation." In most Western deals, lead negotiators, if not the boss himself, will come prepared to make final deals. This is almost never the case with the Chinese.

Decision making processes in China remain communal in nature and a successful venture requires satisfying a variety of group interests. Those group interests are worked out within the group and insiders to the group rarely directly inform their Western counterparts at the bargaining table of the constraints under which they are negotiating. Even if a "decision maker" is at the negotiating table, he or she may not even play an active role in the negotiations. As a result, Chinese negotiations simply cannot be worked out in marathon "final bargaining sessions" common in the West. Marathon work may certainly be accomplished in such sessions, but the finality is relative.

The Eastern Relativity Principle

While Western businessmen are typically process oriented and will bargain with the bottom line economic perspective in mind, Chinese businessmen still see their business in terms of relationships, over the long term. Of course they, too, must make a profit, but relationship precedes profit as the founding issue of the business.

All negotiations will have to address relationship issues in addition to economic ones. Chinese negotiations will include numerous dinners, and what appear to be extracurricular activities, during which Western style negotiations appear to be dismissed. In fact, they are addressed indirectly and/or symbolically, but the process is unfamiliar to the typical western negotiator.

Western negotiators may find relationship issues disturbingly uncomfortable. They do not see the business import of the difficulties which the manager of their counterpart firm is having, in finding a good school for his son to attend. Such personal matters in the West are often derided as "small talk," having no bearing on the details of a business contract to be concluded with their Chinese counterparts. Yet, for the Chinese counterpart these are crucial relationship issues. He or she may be looking for an indication of a level of understanding that transcends the moment, the bottom line, the deal. Thus Westerners frequently miss important issues on the bargaining table. Especially since Chinese consider it bad manners to raise problematic issues directly.

Guess what's being discussed for dinner

In China, problematic issues are frequently raised indirectly or symbolically at the dinners and extracurricular activities, interspersed between directed negotiations. During these dinners direct negotiations are considered bad manners. Should a Westerner attempt them, he frequently will be informed that now is the time to enjoy the dinner and not worry about business. At the same time, during casual conversation, one of his Chinese counterparts may discuss some difficulties that may or may not appear related to the issues at hand. They will always be related in the minds of the Chinese! Westerners would do well to listen and be prepared to either directly propose solutions to those "unrelated problems" at the next bargaining session, or to indirectly do so at an appropriate time before the conclusion of the bargaining.

The long and the short of it

For the Western mind, our conclusion must be: Presently, no technology available can overcome the obvious spatial differences between Western and Eastern negotiating styles.

Neither will technology overcome the differing perspectives taken on the "conclusion" of negotiations.

For the process oriented Westerner, the conclusion will be a contract--a set of axioms and conclusions with as much rigidity of meaning as the lawyers and the rule of law can obtain. That contract defines, for the Westerner, in total the rights and obligations of the parties to the contract.

For the Asian, however, the conclusion of negotiations is the beginning of a relationship. The contract, rather than defining rights and obligations, defines issues crucial to the relationship that must be continually re-negotiated to maintain the equability of the relationship.

For the Westerner the contract ends negotiations, while for the Asian, the contract is closer to an agreement to a relationship--a marriage of sorts--in which the issues of the marriage undergo continual interaction and evolution. The contract for Asians is thus a kind of agreement to go on negotiating. The terms of the contract define the parameters under which negotiations continue, rather than rights and obligations of the parties.

The savvy Western negotiator will not subsequently insist both parties narrowly abide by the terms of the contract in a Western sense. Rather they will point out problems and solutions resulting from variations in the contract and either indirectly or directly propose future compromises which can make up for the damage to the relationship from a particular deviation from the contract.

In brief, a Western contract is too often an end, a contest that is seen as over. An Asian contract is a beginning, an engagement that may be fostered for its future mutual value in a contest that is never over.

A Toast to the Undiscovered Country

Clearly, spatial and temporal differences in negotiating perceptions between East and West cannot be completely overcome through these recent advances in technology. Even the world of Star Trek, wherein possibilities are limited only by the script writers' and consultants' imaginations, has never risked promising that technology could overcome all differences!

Still, optimistically, there is no doubt that new technology will provide better resources, supporting the understanding of other cultures, previously unavailable to the typical Chinese and Western negotiator. The increased accuracy of communication will hopefully allow insights permitting a convergence of cultures, not to the point of indistinguishability, nor due to coercive force, but to a grasp of a mutually beneficial future. The leverage such trans-cultural databases can provide will enhance communication between a process-oriented culture and a symbolically-oriented culture in ways previously impossible without one being assimilated entirely, Borgian style, into the other.

Perfect cultural simile is not the Star Trek ethos to which Walker refers. Perfect simile demands cultural imperialism, requiring one culture to become what it was not. Rather, here a "Star Trek ethos" would be to go boldly, using technology, where man and his cultures have not yet gone. The technological innovations described here certainly qualify as supporting that mission in spirit. And it does seem, as Ambassador Sarin might say, "a worthy goal indeed." Perhaps, to update a famous Nimoy line in The Undiscovered Country, in a sense it is only James Kirk--not Nixon--who could go to China.

And the goal for applying this technology to the inter-cultural problems of Earth?

That we may, all, live long and prosper.