This is important.
When you go to China, you may very well needto bring a gift.
Less and less of something in high value,but you want to bring something that’s unique to you.
So when we tell people what to do and notto do, we’d say avoid the colour white, because it’s a colour of funerals; we shouldavoid clocks because it also remind people of death; avoid the number 4 because it soundslike to die, but you can never cover everything.
I did training for a group that was goingto China, and one of the gentlemen afterward decided on a gift, and their company was fromAlberta, so cowboy hats were very popular, and their company colour was green, so theybrought a green cowboy hat.
They presented this green cowboy hat to thehead of a state-owned enterprise, and on stage gave it to him and didn’t realize that agreen hat meant a cuckold man whose wife is cheating on him.
This story has become the stuff of legends,and the gentleman who did it actually came to my cultural training two months later.
He said: “I think I still have a lot tolearn because I made this very big mistake.
” But I felt really bad because I never thoughtto talk about green and hats and combined.
So what I take away from that story is thatas much as we think we can learn about the dos and don’ts, if we have somebody fromChina on our team, we should always review the gifts with them first.
Source: Youtube
