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Chinese traditions and Western

theories: influences on business

leaders in China

ZHI-XUE ZHANG,CHAO-CHUAN CHEN, LEIGH

ANNE LIU, AND XUE-FENG LIU

T

HISchapter concerns contemporary Chinese business leaders’

management philosophies and the sources of these philos-

ophies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with

thirty-five successful business leaders from enterprises in China.

Content-analyzing the interviews, we identified seven management

philosophies held by these business leaders: sincerity is essential;

pursuit of excellence; social responsibility; harmony is precious;

the Golden Mean (acting in the middle way); specialization; and

scientific management. We found that both Chinese cultural tradi-

tions and Western management theories influence Chinese business

leaders’ management philosophies and practices. While the Western

management theories have great impact on their task-related oper-

ations, Chinese culture has a significant influence on their people

management practices. These findings suggest that modern busi-

ness administration education should balance Western theories and

Chinese philosophies and integrate the wisdoms from the two streams.

Introduction

The term ‘‘management philosophy’’ has appeared frequently in

Chinese popular mass media and Chinese business leaders’ speeches.

In a database named Chinainfobank, we searched for articles contain-

ing ‘‘guan li zhe xue [management philosophy]’’ in newspapers in

China. We found 44 articles published in the period 1990–1999, 198

in 2000–2002, and 165 in 2003–2005. Then we searched for ‘‘guan

The writing of this chapter was supported by a grant from the National Natural

Science Foundation of China (No. 70572019) to the first author. We sincerely

appreciate all those who agreed to be interviewed. We also thank Huairong Xu and

Wei Chen for their assistance in this project.

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