Guanxi is a system of relationships developed over 5,000 years of Chinese history and it is the way in which business deals can be done with a degree of safety and certainty. By creating strong and mutually beneficial relationships with people in positions of power and authority the businessman creates an informal legal and insurance system. Before entering into a relationship with a Chinese businessman you need to have spent time developing your own Guanxi-relationships. Spending time with your Guanxi-partner is essential –you need to create a strong bond of friendship with him/her. Western companies rarely view this process as necessary and blunder into business deals without having the Guanxi-relationships in place beforehand.

TIP: A Guanxi-relationship starts with a genuine friendship.

Point#4 Design Institutes and How to Work with Them.

One of the most important factors in the competition is choosing the right Chinese partner to work with. China has huge local design institutes that do most of the design work (up to 10,000 people working in them including drafts people, designers, 3D artists, quantity surveyors, and workers from every possible combination of the design process). Certainly they are the ones generally used for the construction drawings, where so much of the work and money comes from and their rates are much lower than foreign architect firms. It is really important that the foreign architect is getting alongside these institutes at the beginning, finding out not only which institute the client prefers but finding out who in the design institute he is actually working with. Taking the time to get the right relationship with the design institute is worth its weight in gold.

TIP: When you approach the design institute that you want to work with don’t just roll up and expect that the person you are talking to is going to do everything and put your agenda at the top of his list.

Point #5 Don’t “Own” the Project, it’s Going to Change Before it is Built

It is unlikely that your design is going to see the light of day in the form it was designed. The final implementation then gets put through a design process by the client and the final result is probably not going to be what was envisioned by the architect. Rarely do foreign architects get it ‘absolutely right’ in the design –and that’s not a criticism of the foreign architect. Basically it can happen that maybe the number of units will increase dramatically from the brief. This happens because during the approvals process they manage to convince someone to increase the density, which means that the blocks are squashed together, green space reduced, towers get higher, and floor plans get squeezed. Developers take the ideas from a couple of the entries and start playing with the designs and come up with something completely different.

TIP: If you want to maintain your hair, your sanity and your China based business then learn these rules: Flow like water and don’t hit anybody (two driving rules in China).