Maintaining relationships, giving face, and helping friends is all part of doing business in China. This news brief about a Carrefour in Zhengzhou posted on both our ChinaRetailNews.com and China CSR websites today illustrates a pressure of "guanxi" in China.

The Carrefour supermarket had pressured one of its suppliers to buy some Carrefour mooncakes. The supplier, one of China's biggest dairy companies, refused and instead committed an "act of civil and consumer disobedience" to show Carrefour it didn't want to be bullied into buying mooncakes for the upcoming mid-autumn festival. Fist fights ensued and a few people were arrested.

I chuckled when I saw this piece because our company has also been in the same situation for many years (though we've never been in a fist fight over mooncakes). Currently my Shanghai office still has about RMB2000 worth of mooncakes–about 15 boxes–sitting in the conference room. We previously had over 70 boxes in Shanghai, with more in Beijing and Shenzhen offices. And with mooncakes given during two holidays each year, we spend a sizable amount of money on these chalky treats.

We buy these mooncakes from our hotel clients. In Shanghai we have over 30 hotel clients, and for this upcoming holiday we bought mooncakes from 12 of them. Similar situation in our other offices around China. We neither want, nor need mooncakes, but there is a huge amount of pressure on the sales people at these hotels to sell their products, so they usually ask us nicely, "When are you going to buy our mooncakes?" When you are asked to buy a client's product in a situation like this, it is less of a sales pitch and more of a command. The theory: if we put out a few thousand USD now to buy these mooncakes, we can reap bigger rewards in the future. And thus the guanxi wheel spins round and round…

After we buy these mooncakes, we turn around and give them back to other clients, many of them hotels. So a hotel client often gets a box of mooncakes from us via another hotel. I've spent the last couple of weeks writing letters to clients thanking them for cooperation, etcetera, and wishing them a happy mid-autumn festival. The letter goes into a box and couriered to a client. On top of that, a very unscientific survey done with our own staff reveals that few of those recipients will either eat or keep the mooncakes for themselves. Instead, like a primitive conch shell or a Western Christmas fruitcake, a box of mooncakes might change hands many times before finding its way into a trash bin or somebody's belly.