How Not to Give Partners a ‘Death Wish’ in China

C. Roe Goddard thought he understood local customs. Turns out, he told a group of Chinese businessmen to drop dead.

Mr. Goddard, now a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, was preparing gifts for the members of his joint-venture team at the end of a successful mission to find a drug-manufacturing partner in China. He became enamored with an elegant leather-bound travel clock and couldn’t resist buying one to give each of his 11 Chinese colleagues at a celebratory banquet in Shanghai.

Mr. Goddard had done consulting work in China before, but he didn’t know that the Chinese word for “giving” is Song, and the word “clock” is Zhong, which sounds like a word describing the end of a person’s life. Thanks to that etymological connection, the gift of a clock in China can be construed as “a death wish.”

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