This study seeks to understand and describe the strategies that multinational companies use to develop and maintain relationships with their publics in China. It also seeks to extend the findings to develop a normative theory of relationship management for public relations research.

The author studies cultural factors that affect these strategies and explain why companies use them. The proposed normative theory encompasses types of organization-public relationships, maintenance strategies, the effect of multiple publics in an organization-public relationship, relationship outcomes, and the external forces influencing relationship maintenance and outcomes.