Managing Expatriates in China

Ling Eleanor Zhang is Lecturer of International Management at the School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Her research centres on interaction across boundaries. She examines the boundary spanning of multicultural employees, social categorisation and conflict management between expatriates and host country employees, and the language challenges employees face in subsidiaries of multinational corporations.Anne-Wil Harzing is Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, UK. Prior to that she was Associate Dean Research at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research has been published in the field’s leading journals and has received numerous awards. She currently plays a major role as research mentor and provides extensive academic resources on www.harzing.com.Shea Xuejiao Fan is Lecturer in International Business at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, and has also studied and worked in China, the Netherlands, and the USA. She specialises in expatriate management, cross-cultural management and identity in international management.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Setting the Scene: Expatriates, Language and Culture in China.- 3. Host Country Language: Why It Matters, and Why Expatriates Need to Learn It.- 4. The Impact of Host Country Language Skills on Expatriate Adjustment and the Expatriate-Local Relationship.- 5. Gaining Acceptance from Local Colleagues: Evidence from Indian Expatriates in China.- 6. The Double-Edged Sword of Ethnic Similarity.- 7. Conclusion: Expatriate Language and Identity Challenges, and Recommendations for Expatriate Management.