One Country Bonds Over Baijiu. The Other Bonds Over a Meeting That Never Ends.

🇨🇳 China · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Seventy-eight percent of Chinese employees say strong workplace relationships directly boost productivity and collaboration, according to Randstad's 2022 Workmonitor survey — and in China, building that relationship frequently still runs through a banquet table and repeated shots of a 60%-proof liquor called baijiu. In the Netherlands, team cohesion is engineered through something almost the opposite: consensus, achieved by talking an issue through in a meeting until literally everyone in the room agrees, a process with its own name, the polder model. Both countries treat bonding as essential infrastructure for getting work done. They have picked almost opposite tools to build it.

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Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇳 China

🇳🇱 Netherlands

China: Guanxi Is the Infrastructure

In China, workplace bonding isn't a nice-to-have layered on top of the job — for many employees, it functions as a precondition for the job going well at all. Randstad's 2022 Workmonitor data puts hard numbers on a widely understood cultural fact: 78% of Chinese employees link strong workplace relationships directly to productivity and collaboration, a notably high figure by global standards. The mechanism for building those relationships is guanxi, described by [HROne](https://hrone.com/blog/china-workplace-cultural-norms-understanding-the-unique-dynamics/) as a network of reciprocal trust and favor-exchange cultivated through shared meals, gift exchange, and demonstrated personal loyalty — not primarily through task performance.

The most visible ritual is the business banquet, where baijiu — a fiery, sorghum-distilled liquor as strong as 60% alcohol — has traditionally anchored toasting rounds of "gan bei." But the model has genuine cracks: [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-29/china-work-culture-fuels-metoo-movement-outcry-at-alibaba-didi) reported real public backlash after incidents at Alibaba and Didi tied to forced drinking culture, with even Alibaba's own leadership publicly acknowledging an "ugly forced drinking culture" in need of reform. Regulators have pledged closer oversight, and younger employees are increasingly opting out of heavy drinking in favor of wine or non-alcoholic alternatives — meaning the ritual persists, but its coercive edge is under real pressure.

Netherlands: Consensus as the Bonding Mechanism

Dutch workplace cohesion runs through a fundamentally different channel: talking things through until the room genuinely agrees. This is the polder model — Wikipedia describes it as a Dutch tradition of pragmatic, consensus-based policymaking that dates to economic and social negotiations in the 1980s and '90s, still embedded in institutions like the Social-Economic Council, which has a long track record of defusing labor conflict through negotiated agreement rather than confrontation.

Team bonding in Dutch offices channels this same instinct at a smaller scale. Team-building providers like [Catalyst](https://en.catalystteambuilding.nl/articles/blog/teambonding-teambuilding) frame it explicitly around flat structures and equality — bonding activities exist to connect colleagues "beyond roles and hierarchies," reinforcing a workplace culture that already de-emphasizes hierarchy in daily operation. The bonding isn't really separate from the decision-making process; the extended meeting where everyone gets heard is, itself, the bonding ritual.

The Reckoning

Here's the genuinely counterintuitive part: both systems are, at bottom, mechanisms for manufacturing trust before asking people to commit to something together — China does it through obligation and reciprocity built outside the meeting room, the Netherlands does it through exhaustive agreement built inside it. An outsider who reads China's banquet culture as purely social, or the Netherlands' endless meetings as purely bureaucratic, will miss that both are load-bearing trust infrastructure, not decoration.

Hofstede Insights data draws the line sharply: China scores 80 on power distance and roughly 20 on individualism, reflecting a hierarchical, group-oriented culture where relationship-building naturally routes through respect for seniority. The Netherlands sits at the opposite pole — low power distance, high individualism — yet somehow arrives at an even more elaborate consensus-building apparatus, a reminder that individualist cultures don't necessarily bond less, they just insist on doing it as equals rather than through hierarchy.

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The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone assessing whether Dutch workplace culture is genuinely welcoming to foreigners concluded it's a mixed picture: colleagues are professionally warm and meetings are scrupulously inclusive of every voice in the room, but that same consensus process can feel glacial and opaque to newcomers unused to decisions taking that long to finalize.

Internations — A member of a China-based expat community described being coached before their first banquet to inform the host in advance that they didn't drink, and was relieved to find the accommodation was seamless — a bottle of water appeared with no comment, undercutting their expectation of pressure to keep up.

r/expats — One woman recounted being the only non-drinker at a business dinner and feeling a real pull to keep pace anyway, since the toasting felt less like a beverage choice and more like a test of whether she was taking the relationship seriously.

Blind (teamblind.com) — An employee at a major Chinese tech firm referenced the public scrutiny following the Alibaba drinking-culture controversy, noting that mandatory hoesik-style dinners had become noticeably less common at their company since — though they cautioned the shift was company-specific, not industry-wide.

Conclusion

The practical difference for a new arrival: in China, budget real time and social effort into relationships outside the meeting room — the deal, the promotion, the trust, all move faster once guanxi exists. In the Netherlands, budget that same energy inside the meeting room — showing up, speaking directly, and sticking around for consensus is the relationship-building.

What I'd tell a friend heading to either: in China, go to the dinner, hold your glass a little lower, and don't skip the toast even if you skip the alcohol; in the Netherlands, don't check out of the long meeting — that meeting is the team bonding, whether it feels like it or not.