Chinese Businesses

As been widely noted, the vast majority of Chinese businesses outside the mainland China are family owned. The conventional phrase is family business what the Chinese really have are business families, the difference being that family not business is the focus. This family first, business second principal establishes priorities different from those generally held in the West.

The business family is the contemporary extension of a historical and cultural tradition that has always promoted the family as the fundamental. The reason why the family is fundamental is because china was largely an agrarian state, the family through its capacity to armass and share limited resources, provided a measure of protection against the perils of subsistence living. Following Confucius, the family unit was given a moral dimension. Confucius extended the family beyond its functional role as a natural working unit to serve as the prototype for a broader societal network of morally binding, mutually dependent relationships.

In china the traditional Chinese business can be divided into four pillars.

1. Family-Directed Operation

The typical Chinese business family is headed by either a patriarch or a matriarch usually the individual who founded the business, or his or her direct descendants and family members hold key positions within the business. This core business may then be linked to a web of subsidiaries and allied companies, typically owned by various members of the immediate and extend family. The family business thus emerges as a complex network of companies, with ownership distributed throughout the extend family, and often cross-held to create intrafamily dependencies. Cross-holdings are often not apparent from the outside, and Chinese families generally prefer to keep this information private, especially in areas where the Chinese constitute a minority population.

Common perception is that Chinese business families are mainly privately owned, but significant number of them are actually publicly held. Furthermore in this case