If you’re reading this as part of Stackabl Homes or its partners: this is a lessons-learned document solely for my personal reflection.
Introduction
Before this summer, I’d never stepped foot inside a factory. By the end of the summer, I’d toured seven.
It’s exciting to experience how enthusiastic Chinese manufacturers are to show you their manufacturing facilities. While grabbing noodles near Jing’an temple in Shanghai, my dinner partner - young man from Lagos taking over his father’s CNC business - told me a story of how he’d met a woman who owned a shoe factory near Hangzhou while he was travelling on the train. By the end of their ride, she’d offered to show him around their factory the next week.
However, this raises the question - if you’re looking to do business in China, what do you do after that initial tour of the factory? Or, if you’re just getting ready to manufacture your first batch of products, how do you work with the engineers to solve whatever problems come up?
Some Personal Context
This summer, I was working with a prefab housing company in Shanghai, and I’d discovered an inefficiency in our manufacturing partners’ production process - there was no way for the factory’s clients to track production progress.
If I wanted to know how a particular panel’s production was progressing, I’d have to DM the floor supervisor on WeChat and ask him to get info from the shop floor. My request to trickle down through the various levels of the line, until a QC tech pulled the details off paper logs attached to the panel and forwarded them back up the chain.
“Wouldn’t a dashboard where progress was logged in semi real-time be more efficient?”, I thought. Instead of polling for updates across multiple group chats, we could have a centralized, transparent hub where production progress would get pushed automatically.
Inspecting a window assembly in our partner factory.
How would you create this solution?
Maybe you’d spin up one group chat with your technical team and the factory’s technical team so ideas could be discussed between individuals while relevant stakeholders were silently keeping an eye on the real-time discussions. You’d make sure to keep things out of 1-1 DMs, since that hides the problem (after all, isn’t that how Tesla communicates problems to their external manufactures)?
While you’re at it, schedule a meeting with the software PMs so you can all hash out the proposed dashboard together - bringing discourse out into the open allows everyone to contribute to problem solving.
Now, what changes about this approach in China?
(Apart from the language, smart guy)
Hitting a Wall
When I moved to China, I was coming from a 90% East Asian friend group that regularly hung out in Richmond, a municipality with the highest percentage of Asian residents in North America. This made it easy for me to assume “I know all about how Chinese folks communicate - they’re just more reticent to speak their minds”. While this may be superficially true, the “whys” behind this observation extend far deeper than surface-level social interactions.
As I started rallying to get this dashboard implemented, I quickly realized things weren’t moving forward. Engineers were slow to respond, and sometimes didn’t respond at all. Problems kept getting raised with my proposed solution, but few solutions were suggested. It began to feel like they didn’t want this system implemented at all.
After a few weeks of this, I felt there were deeper issues in my communication with the factory and I decided to hold off on suggesting that any kind of bigger groupchat be created, and after my CEO suggested that I really should look into the nuances of Chinese work culture, I began to research online.
The Importance of Face
I quickly discovered the most important “why” I wasn’t grasping was the concept of 面子 (miànzi) - face.
面子 is best understood as your socially recognized standing - whether other people see you as respectable, competent, appropriate of your role, and trustworthy. From AI, here are some examples:
- An executive whose employees publicly acknowledge his expertise has face.
- A parent whose children are successful may gain face.
- An employee who is publicly praised by their boss gains face.
- Someone important accepting your invitation can give you face.
Building and saving face is the major background process running in the heads of all Chinese employees and businessmen. A significant loss of face happens when someone’s socially claimed identity is contradicted in front of relevant people.
Suppose you’re a manager - you’re supposed to be competent, knowledgeable, in control. Essentially, worthy of authority. Now imagine an employee says in a 30-person group chat: “What you just stated is wrong. Perhaps you missed that detail in the report.” The informational context is: your claim is incorrect - but the social message is: You’re not competent enough to occupy the status you claim. Crucially, because this happened publicly, everyone witnessed the contradiction, and the manager loses face.
Preserving harmony and avoiding loss of face are important aspects of communication in China - criticism, disagreement, or constructive feedback is expected to be expressed privately, never publicly. Directly questioning decisions can cause discomfort.
Info
The Western model assumes that harmony is a byproduct of clarity (we clash, we resolve it, we are clear, we have peace). The Chinese model assumes that clarity is a byproduct of harmony (we maintain a smooth relationship, we don’t corner each other verbally, and we let the work, the data, and the execution reveal the truth).
The Role of Private Messages
From the start of our company’s conversations with the factory, I’d been frustrated by the fact that so many of our communications were in WeChat DMs (or groups with 1-2 additional folks at most). Once I discovered the importance of saving face by not openly criticizing others in public, the rationale behind these DMs became clear.
Decisions are often validated privately before being confirmed publicly, which means outcomes can be delayed or change direction without explicit explanation. This also means that group meetings are used to signal intent and build alignment, rather than being a space for collaborative decision making.
Me furiously taking notes, not realizing this lunch’s purpose was to build 关系 more than make product decisions.
This type of private problem solving - in particular, timeline adjustments - relies heavily on 关系 (guānxì). Managers schedule individual, informal check-ins over WeChat or dinner with single points of contact. In these private meetings, these contacts can safely say “we’re hitting a snag with the supplier” without worrying about losing face.
Thank goodness I didn’t move forward with suggesting the creation of a big group chat with the factory. At best, this suggestion would’ve been shrugged off and created resentment from my end, and if it had been created, the chat would’ve caused even more problems - suppliers would be pinged and silently not respond, as that group environment represented a heightened danger to their face.
Sometimes it might seem like no one’s willing to acknowledge a problem in China. In reality, you’re probably just not in a setting where that person feels comfortable to do so.
Company Leadership
As we’ve seen, credibility in China is built through position (面子), consistency, and long-term relationship investment (关系), rather than participative decision-making alone.
Unlike North American tech companies - where, as a friend from New York said, “you can call the CEO a dumbass”, openly challenging authority in China is uncommon. Leaders are seen as custodians of collective success and are responsible for protecting group harmony, rather than facilitators of debate.
This means personal opinions can often be subordinated to group consensus - loyalty to the organization and leaders is highly valued, and individuals will avoid standing out if it risks disrupting harmony.
My present self cringes to think about how I must’ve been perceived when I challenged our factory’s chief architect several times during a team meeting, receiving mostly silence, smiles, or taciturn agreement in return.
This expected role of a leader in China means they may take a personal interest in the wellbeing of their teams, a kind of big-brother or fatherly role that reinforces commitment and compliance expectations (international managers might find this kind of relationship overbearing).
View of a boss - Blue: western, Red: Chinese - credit
When Yes Means No
In more formal, inter-company relationships, it’s impossible to avoid situations where there’s a potential for losing face.
As the factory wrapped up the manufacturing of our panels, I began to notice that they were reluctant to commit to the date when the products would be shipped to the port. However, there were never any direct refusals, and we actually received responses that appeared positive - for example, when asking “can you get the shipment out on Friday”, we’d be told “we’ll try our best”.
This type of reply signals “yes” to a Westerner, but any Chinese would take as an acknowledgement of a request, but certainly not a commitment. This “soft no” is a way for the responder to allow the questioner to save face. Saying “no” explicitly would cause a loss of face, and damage the relationship and trust.
These “soft no’s” are actually quite common in North American social contexts. How many times have you said “I’d love to come, but I really have to finish my schoolwork,” or “I’ll see if my partner will let me go out”. My surprise in China was that this is also the standard way of communicating “no” in a business context.
Other examples of this “soft no” include:
- Decisions being deferred to higher management
- Acting as if they’re the ones causing an inconvenience to soften the blow, or expressing embarrassment in order to say no
- “We’ll try our best” (difficult/unlikely)
- “Might be inconvenient” (we can’t do that)
- “We’ll look into it” (answer’s currently no)
- “This issue isn’t too serious” (big problem)
And the most common of all “silence ” (no). For Westerners - at least for me - it was incredibly difficult initially to accept that these forms of no (especially silence!) held the same weight as a verbal no.
My lifeguarding background literally requires me to make sure someone verbally acknowledges they’ve heard my request to call 911 with a “yes”.
Furthermore, “I’m not sure”, “maybe”, “perhaps” are all forms of “no”, since they allow both parties to save face by not saying no directly), while non-committal forms like “I understand”, “sure”, and “I know” are used to put issues on hold. If you ever call a Chinese sales office and you’re told to reach out again in a few weeks or months, consider it a no.
Phrasing Questions to Avoid Face-Saving
To avoid the confusion of a “soft no”, the best way to ask questions in China is so their answers require more than a yes or no response. For example:
- don’t ask “can we get the shipment on Friday”. Instead ask, “what will it take to get the shipment on Friday”
- don’t ask “Is there a problem?”. Instead ask, “What is the biggest bottleneck right now for this order?”
This becomes more nuanced for deadlines. Chinese businesses generally avoid setting hard deadlines if they risk missing them, since this would cause a big loss of face. If a Westerner tries to force a hard deadline, they’ll give unrealistic “yes” to maintain harmony, or remain deliberately vague as a method of postponing the issue.
To keep things moving forward, use incremental milestones instead of deadlines, and tie timelines to objective logic and process rather than forcing individuals to stake personal reputations committing to a date. For instance, instead of, “Can we launch on Oct 10”, use, “Once phase A data is ready, Phase B will automatically require 10 days of processing”.
Global PMs working in China sometimes maintain an internal timeline including a silent 20% to 30% time buffer for unexpected shifts alongside an external timeline presented to the team.
What About Startups?
Chinese startups move just as fast - if not faster - than those in North America. They can’t stretch out a maybe to a few weeks or months, and will instead use speed and execution to say no.
If an idea is brought up by a manager, they won’t argue in the meeting - they’ll create three prototypes to present the next day as a data-driven proof of whether that idea is worthwhile pursuing. Data acts as an unbiased way to save face - the market/stats/math delivers the bad news, not the individual.
Since there’s no way around the loss of face that comes with missing deadlines, 996 steps in to meet the demands. Once the founder sets the direction, there is zero internal friction as the entire org moves without debate to meet that vision, while those behind-the-scenes DMs happen laterally between peers to smooth out any implementation issues, meaning many Chinese startups succeed through brute force execution.
Aside: Wolf Culture
This brute-force approach is a characteristic of Huawei’s “wolf culture” — 狼性文化 (lángxìng wénhuà). This describes a management ethos emphasizing aggressiveness, resilience, teamwork, discipline, and a strong drive to win, especially in sales and competitive markets.
The metaphor is that wolves are hungry, persistent, coordinated, and willing to fight hard for survival. At Huawei, this idea has been linked to its demanding performance culture and expectation that employees push through difficult conditions to achieve ambitious goals.
The term can be used positively inside Chinese business discourse to mean toughness and execution, but it is also criticized for encouraging excessive pressure, long hours, and an “always fighting” mentality.
- Details generated by ChatGPT.
Conclusion
In general, demonstrating how data-driven changes contribute to stability, harmony, and long-term success increases acceptance of solutions or buy-in to milestones.
Now I know that all along, the factory was saying no to the idea of that production dashboard - and now I have the cultural tools to be able start finding out why.