{"id":71299,"date":"2018-06-11T08:29:54","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T06:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/?post_type=news&#038;p=71299\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T12:24:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T10:24:31","slug":"building-trust-for-foreigners-in-china","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/en\/news\/building-trust-for-foreigners-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Building trust for foreigners in China"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_71302\" style=\"width: 210px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-71302\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"img-responsive wp-image-71302 size-medium\" title=\"Jingjing Yao \" src=\"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/YAO-Jingjing-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"yao-jingjing\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/YAO-Jingjing-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/YAO-Jingjing-100x150.jpg 100w, https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/YAO-Jingjing.jpg 365w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-71302\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jingjing Yao<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>Based on an interview with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/enseignement-et-recherche\/enseignant\/?id=2453\">Jingjing Yao<\/a> (February 2018) and on his article \u201cUnderstanding the trust deficit in China: Mapping positive experience and trust in strangers\u201d, co-written with Zhi-Xue Zhang, Jeanne Brett and J. Keith Murnighan (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2017).<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>In China, there has traditionally been a cultural tendency towards distrust of strangers. This cultural trait may potentially hinder economic development when it comes to business transactions with foreign companies. By understanding the peculiar way social networks function in China, however, a team of researchers reveals a surprisingly easy way to bridge the trust gap.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>In the West, <em>the early bird gets the worm<\/em>. In China, <em>the first bird out gets shot<\/em>. The West values boldness, China, cautiousness. The Chinese aversion to risk is also visible in a general distrust of strangers. After all, trust is a willingness to be vulnerable, to be potentially betrayed by the other party. A 2014 large-scale social survey, The Blue Book of Social Mentality, found that less than half of respondents felt that \u201cmost people can be trusted\u201d while only about 30 percent trusted strangers. \u201cFrom my own observations, newspapers and academic literature, there is a sense that the Chinese don&#8217;t place trust easily. It&#8217;s very prevalent,\u201d says Professor Jingjing Yao. He and his co-authors define strangers according to a crucial Chinese concept, that of <em>guanxi. Guanxi<\/em> is an informal relationship between individuals linked by social norms that govern mutual commitment and loyalty. \u201cIt creates a strong boundary between family or friends, and those with whom you have no connection and are categorized as strangers, between ingroup and outgroup,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n<h4>Trust as a foundation for business<\/h4>\n<p>Needless to say, foreign businesspeople trying to break into Chinese markets fall into the \u201cstranger\u201d category. Lack of trust could thus be a major obstacle to China&#8217;s continued international economic development, especially as the interactions between Chinese and foreign businesspeople are only likely to increase as the global marketplace evolves. US scholar Francis Fukuyama even argues in his book, <em>Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity<\/em>, that trust is the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation&#8217;s prosperity and competitiveness. Fukuyama contrasts the economic success of such \u201chigh-trust societies\u201d as Japan and Germany with the rigidities of \u201clow-trust societies\u201d such as China, suggesting that there is a virtually unbreakable boundary between ingroups and outgroups in China. But Professor Yao argues that the elastic nature of <em>guanxi<\/em> could reshape this boundary.<\/p>\n<h4>Building trust through positive experiences<\/h4>\n<p>According to Professor Yao, the good news is that distrust can be overcome through positive experiences with \u201coutgroup members\u201d, or strangers. Those initial positive experiences create a virtuous circle, encouraging more positive interactions with strangers moving forwards. The researchers draw upon intergroup contact theory, which posits that positive experiences contradict \u2013 and so allow people to correct \u2013 negative views and reduce prejudice. They cite the example of friendships between gay and straight men found to reduce homophobic attitudes. In a business context in China, a foreign partner granting a favor, for example giving access to a more mature global market, could help change perceptions of foreigner trustworthiness. Most importantly, the positive perception does not apply exclusively to the partner who did the initial favor, but potentially to a third party, or foreign businesspeople in general. In Professor Yao&#8217;s words, \u201cIt can be generalized to all foreigners, meaning the Chinese businessman may later, in turn, help a partner from a different country.\u201d<\/p>\n<h4>Changing perspectives one story at a time<\/h4>\n<p>Exchange of behaviors between three (or more) parties is called indirect reciprocity. It is what mediates the relationship between positive outgroup, or stranger, experiences and a person&#8217;s trust in strangers. While lots of academic literature already documents trust, Professor Yao and his co-researchers identify this precise psychological mechanism. They support their hypothesis with a series of studies in which participants were primed with narratives about positive ingroup and outgroup experiences, or took part in online games involving money sharing, then used attitudinal measures or behavioral indicators to assess their trust in unfamiliar assigned teams or partners. In all four experimental settings, the effect of positive outgroup, or stranger, narratives was significant. \u201cEven exposing the participants to just a story \u2013 one featured a boy asking for help from an unknown passerby to shore up a dike and protect the village from flooding \u2013 triggered a change in perception,\u201d says Professor Yao.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Practical applications<\/h3>\n<p>First of all, Professor Yao cautions, foreigners must understand the ingroup-outgroup mentality in China: \u201cDon&#8217;t panic, it&#8217;s normal to be treated like an outsider at the very beginning.\u201d To gain trust, he recommends offering favors as a way to generate the positive experiences that will overcome the cultural distrust of foreigners in China. \u201cIf you offer something (help), and the recipient feels grateful, then <em>guanxi<\/em> means they will have an obligation to return the favor, and that&#8217;s how you start building something,\u201d he explains. Still, he warns that there is no absolute answer, because China is so huge and diverse. \u201cThe story is different in Beijing and in Shanghai, and again in open, US-style cities like Shenzhen, as well as depending on the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Biography<\/h3>\n<p>Jingjing Yao is Professor in international negotiations at I\u00c9SEG School of Management (Lille). He obtained his Ph.D. in Organization Management from Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in 2015.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Methodology<\/h3>\n<p>The researchers assessed the effects of three different positive experiences (perceived support, help and trusting behavior) on people&#8217;s trust in strangers. They used four experimental settings with Chinese participants, then used secondary data from a survey in China to examine the effects of ingroup versus outgroup experience on trust in strangers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Based on an interview with Jingjing Yao (February 2018) and on his article \u201cUnderstanding the trust deficit in China: Mapping positive experience and trust in strangers\u201d, co-written with Zhi-Xue Zhang, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":100537,"menu_order":0,"template":"","news-category":[56,298],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Building trust for foreigners in China - I\u00c9SEG<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Based on an interview with Jingjing Yao and on his article \u201cUnderstanding the trust deficit in China: Mapping positive experience and trust in strangers\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ieseg.fr\/en\/news\/building-trust-for-foreigners-in-china\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Building trust for foreigners in China - 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