This study focuses on Chinese expatriates who have lived in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong for more than eighteen years and who are working as middlemen for Americans in the United States. It is the first attempt to explore Chinese expatriates' perceptions of U.S.-China joint venture or cooperative business project negotiations and relations.; This research is ideographic and data is collected through personal interview. Thirty-six interviewees are selected for analysis. Their years of experience in representing U.S. clients in U.S.-China business negotiations range from one to twenty.; These expatriates work as centralized information providers, context creators, conflict resolvers, and risk absorbers between two sides. These expatriates' main objective is to obtain an agreement between two sides. Most pledge their reputations and their long term relationships with the Chinese in their work. They prefer to split their roles and deal with the Chinese and American representative separately. The more roles they can split, the more they can adopt local Chinese context. They influence the Chinese by creating many similar characteristics between themselves and the Chinese, while they influence the Americans by their task and substantive knowledge.; Most expatriates perceive that major obstacles in their work are as follows: Imperfect translation and interpretation; American representatives' arrogant attitude, their legal-oriented manner, and their lack of preparation for negotiation; Chinese representatives' irresponsible behavior, and insufficient international business knowledge. Most expatriates prefer to educate Americans rather than Chinese representatives and expect Americans to make more changes than the Chinese.; There are five major characteristics of these interviewees. They are "government Chinese" (Type I); "provincial Chinese" (Type II), "young professional Chinese" (Type III), "careerist corporate Chinese" (Type IV), and "senior successful Chinese businessmen" (Type V). These five key characteristics of these interviewees are related to their own identities and their experience in two systems.; The study shows that Chinese expatriates' personal identities, their culture-fulfilling prophecies, their fear, and their perceptions of Chinese and American representatives' problems are found to impede their process of serving Americans and developing trusting relationships between Americans and Chinese in joint venture or cooperative business project negotiations.; The study suggests that the ways to transfer the trust in relationships between Chinese expatriates and Chinese representatives to relationships between Chinese expatriates and American representatives are to develop trusting relationships between Chinese expatriates and American representatives and to develop "cultural unlearning" programs for Chinese expatriates.
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