The Chabuduo Mindset

If you are adapted to Western culture, you are possibly accustomed to things being completed to terms and high values. You may not expect less than 100%.

In China, the common outlook is based on one term: “Chabuduo”, its mean “almost” or “nearly”. It also means “Good enough”. 

Good enough or not quite?

Tony was a businessman and Italian friend; he asked his Chinese worker to check out a document, add a vertical line on the left, and aligned all the text with that line. The employee adds the vertical line, but don’t align all the text with it. 

When the employee gives back the document, Tony pointed out that the text is not lined up properly. The employee stunned, from her point of view the alignment was “good enough”.

Attention to characteristic and consistency

Further than the Chabuduo approach, you will come upon a common difference in attention to characteristics and consistency. This is marked in documents where the configuring looks to be all over the place with different typestyles and font sizes. For Chinese employees work means transforming between Chinese and English keyboard settings. When transforming to English settings, the font commonly defaults back to a different style and size used before. Many Chinese don’t find the difference between different font styles used for Chinese characters.

When a Chinese gets an English statement, sentence, or complete section, this English segment may get copied and pasted into any other documents without additional analysis and version. For instance, an item name or other facts may not bring up to date to copy the existing document. Or the complete perspective may not certainly fit or run with the introduced section. 

It is said that when you charge a Chinese worker with English communication for a Western client or with the groundwork of significant English documents, you have to focus on the output. To shorten the number of modification restatements, you should give very particular style directions, if possible with a pattern, and evaluate everything cautiously. 

Clean and detailed documents give expression to be a Western pet peeve. Many people in China would scrabble and raid through any file, it doesn’t matter how authorized it is. So, to save the original documents, you should make sure to bring a copy to use on.

Chinese Practicality

Chinese are very practical, which can be very convenient if you want to get some tasks completed quickly. For instance, once I go for my HSK exam and I forget to take my photos. The clerk just brings his smartphone, snapped my photo, and inserted it into my application. In any other country, I would have been told to go back and bring the requested photos. 

All at once, there is risk lying in that practicality. Critical turns and the “Chabuduo” term to get something done quickly or cheaper can strictly influence the quality of the production.