I never had to think about how Chinese business works.
It was just how things work.

I grew up in China. Over more than a decade, I worked across event planning, real estate, and the technology sector, with clients ranging from internet startups to large domestic enterprises. Early in my career I focused on government affairs and corporate liaison work, which meant learning how decisions actually get made in China, not just how they appear to get made from the outside.

Before I met my husband, I never thought about how Chinese business works. It was just how things work. It wasn't until I watched him struggle with patterns I had always taken for granted that I realized: what feels obvious to me is completely invisible to most people working with Chinese partners from the outside.

My husband grew up in the United States. His parents came from China. He speaks Mandarin. He has been surrounded by Chinese culture his whole life. And he still gets it wrong. Not because he isn't paying attention, but because Chinese business runs on a different operating logic, and that logic isn't written down anywhere.

I know Chinese business from the inside because I lived it for over ten years, across different industries and types of organizations. And I understand where the confusion starts because I have watched the people closest to me run into it.