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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: China Today
- Sprache: Englisch
How do social relations, or guanxi, matter in China today and how can this distinctive form of personal connection be better understood? In Guanxi: How China Works, Yanjie Bian analyzes the forms, dynamics, and impacts of guanxi relations in reform-era China, and shows them to be a crucial part of the puzzle of how Chinese society operates. Rich in original studies and insightful analyses, this concise book offers a critical synthesis of guanxi research, including its empirical controversies and theoretical debates. Bian skillfully illustrates the growing importance of guanxi in diverse areas such as personal network building, employment and labor markets, informal business relationships, and the broader political sphere, highlighting guanxi's central value in China's contemporary social structure. A definitive statement on the topic from a top authority on the sociology of guanxi, this book is an excellent classroom introduction for courses on China, a useful reference for guanxi researchers, and ideal reading for anyone interested in Chinese culture and society.
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Seitenzahl: 386
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Table of Contents
Cover
Map
Chronology
Preface
1
:
What is
Guanxi
?
Guanxi
in Everyday Chinese Life
Guanxi
As Local Knowledge
Theoretical Models of
Guanxi
in The Social Sciences
A Sna Approach Toward
Guanxi
Guanxi
as Resource Mobilizer: A Concluding Note
2
:
Guanxi
and Network Building
Guanxi
Interaction as an Everyday Phenomenon
Guanxi
Cultivation and Expansion Through Banquets
Guanxi
Exchanges at Events of Cultural Significance
Guanxi
Networks and Social Class
A Concluding Note: Rural–Urban Differences
3
:
Guanxi
and Jobs
The Maoist Era
The Post-Mao Era
The Dynamics of
Guanxi
Empirical Evidence from Large-Scale Social Surveys
Summary
4
:
Guanxi
and Business Founding
China'S Business World: An Overview
Guanxi
As Mechanisms of Self-Employment
Guanxi
As Mechanisms of Business Founding
Entrepreneur Networks in Business Founding and Later Success
5
:
Guanxi
and Organizational Development
Theoretical Perspectives on
Guanxi
–Organization Relations
Guanxi
as Mechanisms of Organizational Governance
Guanxi
as Mechanisms of Organizational Performance
Foreign Organizations in
Guanxi
Culture
6
:
Guanxi
and Politics
Nepotism and
Guanxi
Networks in A Local Government
Guanxi
Favoritism and The Politics of Promotion
Guanxi
Favoritism in The Politicized Legal System
7
:
Guanxi
and Social Structure
The Internal and External Logics of
Guanxi
Guanxi
Networks and Social Structure
Guanxi
Networks as Social Structure
A Research Agenda
Bibliography
Chinese-Language References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of figures
Figure 2.1: An Ego–Alter Network
Figure 2.2: Percent Distribution of Households in New Year Social Exchanges
Figure 3.1: Trends of Job Acquisition through Guanxi Ties, 1978–2014 (N = 19,016) Data compiled from CGSS 2003, 2008; JSNET 1999, 2009, 2014.
Figure 4.1: Event Contacts Are Guanxi Regardless of Citation Order Source: Burt and Opper (2017: figure 7)
Figure 6.1: Education Matching by Year of Job Entry
Figure 6.2: Dispute Pagoda by Political Connections, Rural China, 2002 Source: Michelson (2007a: figure 1)
Figure 6.3: Lawyers’ Evaluations of Their Institutional Environment Items D–G are rearranged from the author's original order to honor the frequencies of “0” responses. Source: Data from Michelson (2007b: table 4)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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China Today series
Richard P. Appelbaum, Cong Cao, Xueying Han, Rachel Parker & Denis Simon, Innovation in China
Greg Austin, Cyber Policy in China
Yanjie Bian, Guanxi: How China Works
Adam Yuet Chau, Religion in China
Jeroen de Kloet and Anthony Y. H. Fung, Youth Cultures in China
Steven M. Goldstein, China and Taiwan
David S. G. Goodman, Class in Contemporary China
Stuart Harris, China's Foreign Policy
William R. Jankowiak and Robert L. Moore, Family Life in China
Elaine Jeffreys with Haiqing Yu, Sex in China
Michael Keane, Creative Industries in China
Joe C. B. Leung and Yuebin Xu, China's Social Welfare
Hongmei Li, Advertising and Consumer Culture in China
Orna Naftali, Children in China
Eva Pils, Human Rights in China
Pitman B. Potter, China's Legal System
Pun Ngai, Migrant Labor in China
Xuefei Ren, Urban China
Nancy E. Riley, Population in China
Janette Ryan, Education in China
Judith Shapiro, China's Environmental Challenges 2nd edition
Alvin Y. So and Yin-wah Chu, The Global Rise of China
Teresa Wright, Party and State in Post-Mao China
Teresa Wright, Popular Protest in China
Jie Yang, Mental Health in China
You Ji, China's Military Transformation
LiAnne Yu, Consumption in China
Xiaowei Zang, Ethnicity in China
Guanxi: How China Works
Yanjie Bian
polity
Copyright © Yanjie Bian 2019
The right of Yanjie Bian to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
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To Nan Lin
My Teacher, Doctoral Advisor, and Lifelong Mentor
Chronology
Preface
This book is about the social logic of how China works. The focus of analysis is on guanxi, the Chinese expression of personalized social relations. Personal and social relations are important in every culture and society because people live and work in the contexts of these relations. In Western countries, for example, it is common for people to have close personal relations while keeping social relations at a certain distance. In China, however, social relations may not matter much unless and until they are personalized to become part of a focal individual's guanxi network. You get a good job through your guanxi contacts. You start a new business with the money borrowed from and the business contract extended by your guanxi contacts. You manage an organization and sustain it through your guanxi networks of diverse ties. You are both ambitious and competent, and you are a big achiever in the job you do. But you may not get promoted to positions of higher rank or elected into prestigious societies of national honor without mobilizing your guanxi ties to help. Even filing a lawsuit or doing a legal job cannot be free of the underlying social logic of guanxi favoritism.
This book has grown out of my long interest in guanxi scholarship. Growing up in China, I lived in a guanxi culture. But this does not mean I automatically understood the nature of guanxi favoritism, or that I could uncover the internal and external logics of prevalent guanxi influence without adequate academic training. This training started with my reading of Fei Xiaotong's pre-1949 works when I was a college student in China in 1978–81. I gained a more systematic training in social network analysis (SNA) when I engaged in doctoral and postdoctoral research in the United States from 1985 to 1991. A SNA seminar with Nan Lin in my second year of doctoral study enlightened me, planting the scholarly seed of my research interest in guanxi as social exchange networks. Nan's teaching, his one-on-one coaching, his supervising of my dissertation, and his continuous mentoring during my postdoctoral career have been instrumental to my growth from a young student to a learned scholar about guanxi and social networks. This book is dedicated to Nan, my lifelong mentor.
A few other great scholars have each made a unique impact on my guanxi research. At Nankai University in 1981, Fei Xiaotong taught me and my classmates in a sociology class that marked the restoration of sociology to the Chinese college curriculum after its elimination in 1952. Fei's theory of the “mode of differential associations” gave me my first ever view of the centrality of guanxi in Chinese social structure. Andrew Walder, a senior colleague of mine when we both taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology during 1997–2001, showed me how to study China in sociological perspective; his concept of “instrumental particular ties” uncovered the theoretical nature of guanxi practices in Mao's and the post-Mao era. The works of Mayfair Yang and Yunxiang Yan, two influential social anthropologists on guanxi scholarship, have directed my attention to both the complex cultural meanings of guanxi and the resilience of guanxi norms in China under reform; I benefited from their comments on my work, and I enjoyed our personal conversations as well as scholarly exchanges at and outside of academic conferences. Finally, Ron Burt, a SNA authority, and Nancy DiTomaso, a well-known sociologist of racial stratification, have each made a remarkable contribution to my rethinking of guanxi. Ron's definition of guanxi as a network structure and his original research on “event contacts” are a showcase of how the study of guanxi networks can enrich the SNA knowledge system. Nancy has urged me to compare guanxi in China to social capital in the US, and her insistence that “these are essentially the same thing” has left a deep mark in my mind when conceptualizing guanxi and social capital. I've enjoyed and will continue to enjoy my collaboration with each of them.
Jonathan Skerrett at Polity Press has been a strong force and support behind this book. He approached me for this book project and waited, long before I was convinced and available to write it for Polity's China Today series. Like other books in the series, this one is intended as a small text for college and postgraduate courses on China. For me, this book is actually a half-and-half product: one half of the book is on my original research and the other half a summary of theoretical and empirical materials from other guanxi researchers. Given the limited space, I have chosen to discuss the prevalence and the increasing significance of guanxi favoritism in the social, economic, political, and legal spheres in China under reform, leaving other topics unattended to. I've made an effort to present quantitative materials in a way that can be understood and appreciated by readers without much quantitative training. A number of more detailed statistical tables can be found online at the book's webpage on www.politybooks.com/guanxi. I'm grateful for Jonathan's patience as well as for the useful comments of two anonymous reviewers he invited on my behalf to evaluate an earlier draft.
I'm grateful also for many collaborators and participants in the survey projects I've conducted since 1997, and a good deal of data from these projects is presented in this book. Deborah Davis and Shaoguang Wang were my collaborators on a 1997–2000 project, sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation, on urban consumers and material culture in Chinese cities; this project was the first opportunity to measure Chinese New Year visitor networks and social eating networks, which are discussed in chapter 2. The main participants in this project included Wang Hui (who passed away in 2017 at the age of 87) and Guan Ying in Tianjin, Lu Hanlong and Li Yu in Shanghai, Liu Xin and Wang Tie in Wuhan, and Song Ding, Xu Daowen, and Yi Songguo in Shenzhen. A grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (HKUST6052/98H) funded my first Job-Search Network (JSNET) survey project in 1998–9, and a number of grants from China (11AZD022, 13&ZD177) financed subsequent data collections of the JSNET project in 2009, 2014, and 2016. The JSNET project is heavily used in this book, especially in chapter 3; the key collaborators in the project were Liu Shaojie and Wang Wenbin in Changchun, Zhang Wenhong in Tianjin and Shanghai, Bai Hongguang, Guan Xinping, and Mi Shu in Tianjin, Lin Juren and Wu Yuxiao in Jinan, Li Yu in Shanghai, Qiu Haixiong and Liang Yucheng in Guangzhou, Hu Rong and Gong Wenjuan in Xiamen, Feng Shiping and Li Huai in Lanzhou, and Li Liming, Yang Jianke, Zhang Shun, and Zhao Wenlong in Xi’an. My formal and current doctoral advisees Cheng Cheng, Guo Xiaoxian, Hao Mingsong, Huang Xianbi, Li Yinghui, Lu Qiang, Quan Xiaojuan, Sun Yu, Xiao Yang, Yang Yang, and Zhang Lei prepared datasets and many statistical tables and figures presented in this book and on the webpage, and Zhang Yixue provided technical assistance with the bibliography.
My special thanks are due to my wife Qinghong for her love and companionship. As always, she is the first listener to my “presentation” of ideas in rough form at home. Her reactions are as important as her personal reflections on Chinese life. I'm also grateful to my sons Peter and John, as well as their significant others Linda and Kayoko, respectively, for their emotional support. To them, Dad is always working and not making much time for the family. After this book, is a change expected? They may still wonder.
I thank Polity Press editors for their professional assistance. Jonathan Skerrett, once again, worked with me on my first drafts, offering highly useful comments on the narratives of each chapter as well as specific suggestions on the presentation of quantitative materials. Fiona Sewell provided thorough and diligent copyediting, and her effort has improved the exposition of this book. And others at Polity Press have been a source of advice and help at various stages of this book's production.
The main contents of this book were written and revised while I was taking my sabbatical leave from the University of Minnesota and residing at Xi’an Jiaotong University during the academic year of 2017–18. I'm grateful to both institutions for their support in many different ways.
Yanjie BianMinneapolis, Minnesota, USANovember 10, [email protected]
1 What is Guanxi?
What is guanxi? A British social scientist said the following: “Chinese guanxi is not a term which can adequately be expressed by an English-language equivalent of one word, the concept is too culture specific” (Parnell 2005: 35). “How much cultural specificity is there in the term guanxi?” one may ask. Well, it is complicated. This answer, believe it or not, can apply to almost all the questions we have about China. Chinese politics is complicated. Chinese history is complicated. China's market economy is one with Chinese characteristics, so it is complicated, too. What about Chinese culture and society? That is not just complicated, it is a big puzzle that no one really understands! This last statement represents the judgment we frequently hear from classroom instructors teaching about Chinese culture and society.
So, let us start our examination of guanxi with something simple. A simple understanding of Chinese guanxi reduces its cultural specificities and prepares readers for more complicated meanings of the term while reading through the text. In this spirit, I share my 1+3 points about what guanxi is: Guanxi is simply a connection between two individuals, but importantly it is a personalized connection, a subjectively close connection, and a potentially resourceful connection. Let us apply this 1+3 scheme to everyday Chinese life for further elaboration.
Guanxi in Everyday Chinese Life
In a Personal Context
Guanxi is a connection between two individuals. This involves a dichotomy: kin and non-kin (Lin 2001a). Kin connections include ties of immediate family, extended family, close kin, and distant kin. Built upon blood and marriage lineages, kinship networks define structural boundaries for one's kin ties. Non-kin ties, on the other hand, are much broader than kin ties, and their structural boundaries are multidimensional. Any geographic place and social institution to which an individual has ever been attached during his or her lifetime establishes a structural boundary within which to develop non-kin ties. Hometown folks, classmates, comrades-in-arms, work colleagues, and neighbors are a few examples for illustration. But none of these can become or sustain guanxi ties if they fail to meet the following three qualifications: personal, close, resourceful.
Guanxi is a personalized tie. What makes a tie personal? A one-on-one conversation that shares secrets and gossips makes a tie personal. Expressing sympathy or offering care to a hospitalized friend makes a tie personal. Providing help as a favor to a neighbor who desperately needs it makes a tie personal. Saving a colleague from trouble even at one's own risk makes a tie personal. These kinds of scenarios do not occur randomly; only a proportion of kin and non-kin contacts are elevated to the level of personalized ties through events of personal significance. These events include, as we shall see throughout this book, life-cycle events of local significance (Yan 1996) and family emergencies (Chang 2010), events of cultural significance (Bian 2001), career promotion (Wang 2016), and business founding and development (Burt and Burzynska 2017).
Guanxi is a subjectively close tie. Personalized ties are personal, subject to the involved parties’ perceptions of sentimental attachment and obligation fulfillment to each other. Even among kin, biological or role relationships do not automatically generate guanxi between people unless such relationships result in active and intimate interactions in the personal worlds (Kipnis 1997: 7). In this sense, Sahlins's (1965/1972) notion of “social distance” applies to both kin and non-kin ties in how they perceive each other. When these perceptions are mutually high, a guanxi tie is sustained; otherwise the accumulated problems may lead to the dissolution of a guanxi tie. The highest point of guanxi is when the two parties maintain mutual perceptions of familial sentiments and obligations to each other (Fei 1947/1992; Liang 1949/1986). That “master–apprentice relations are equivalence to father–son relations” (师徒如父子, shitu ru fuzi) is a well-known example of the point.
Finally, guanxi is a potentially resourceful tie. Personalized ties are expected by the parties involved to facilitate exchanges of favors for expressive and instrumental purposes. While expressive purposes are interactions intended for the emotional and psychological gains of the parties involved, instrumental purposes are the exchanges of tangible and intangible resources that benefit one or both parties in social interaction (Lin 2001b). In a guanxi tie, one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor, and vice versa. The two parties need not be of equal social status (Yan 2006), but they must have access to non-redundant resources to satisfy the exchange of favors (Bian 2010). Failure to reciprocate a favor is a violation of mutual obligation and hurts sentimental feelings. Therefore, a close personal tie may quickly lose its instrumental value when the two parties are completely redundant to each other. This is especially so for career-driven people (Feng 2010). Among retirees and the elderly, close personal ties keep together resource-redundant people for expressive favor exchanges.
In a Business Context
Economic actors are socially embedded (Granovetter 1985). In Chinese guanxi culture, this has two important implications. First, it is the well connected who do business with each other and do it well. That is, entrepreneurs who have guanxi ties to resourceful others are likely to start a business and operate it to a respectable level (Bian and Zhang 2014). Second, poorly connected entrepreneurs who have bright business ideas must cultivate guanxi ties to resourceful others in order to convert and capitalize their ideas into profitable business operations (Zhang 2016).
Prior guanxi ties before business are of fundamental importance for new ventures to emerge. They are the support networks to obtain business opportunity, mobilize financial capital, and recruit core members of the business team (Bian 2008a). Lacking prior ties of this nature can be frustrating for foreign businesspeople investing in China, especially when they try to use Western values to make ethical judgments about developing and utilizing social relationships for economic activities (Lovett, Simmons, and Kali 1999; Nolan 2011). To Chinese businesspeople, “the social relationship is a prerequisite to get involved in a business relationship” (Gomez-Arias 1998: 150). Among 700 randomly selected businesses in the Yangtze River Delta, every one of them was assisted by at least one guanxi contact at founding (Burt and Burzynska 2017).
Guanxi networks are mechanisms of continuous business success. Kinship networks are at the core of the governance structure in township and village enterprises (Lin 1995) and function well as a substitute of property rights laws (Peng 2004). Barriers to entry motivate Chinese entrepreneurs to build their own networks of suppliers and distributors, and to develop competitive advantage in self-organized industrial clusters in which close-knit groups of like-minded people establish reliable business norms for the emerging private economy (Nee and Opper 2012). Ties to government officials, on the other hand, are the key channels through which to acquire economic resources (Li et al. 2011) and develop local firms (Wank 1999), govern relational contracts (Zhou et al. 2003), operate business groups (Keister 2001), and systematically increase the economic performance of all types of enterprises (Chen, Chen, and Huang 2013), including publicly listed enterprises (Haveman et al. 2017).
In a Political Context
When resources and opportunities are vertically allocated in organizational hierarchy, guanxi ties operate in a political context, which involves the distribution of power, the range of stakeholders involved and their interests, and the interplay of formal and informal rules that govern the interactions among different stakeholders. Guanxi ties to the stakeholders are especially important when informal rules are more practical and effective than formal rules in a centralized power structure.
In a top national university, a great research project of international significance cannot be founded unless it wins the favor of at least three stakeholders. The first is the university lead scientist in the area who has the professional authority as well as within- and between-university networks to ascertain the value of the project. The second is the director of the functional office having operational authority to select one project over others. The third and most important stakeholder is the number one decision-maker of the university, whether the Party secretary or the president. To win over severe competition for vertically allocated major projects, guanxi ties must be used to persuade and influence these stakeholders not just in public deliberations but more importantly in private. Beyond the university boundary, guanxi ties to key government officials are decisive because they wield the authority to approve projects.
The importance of guanxi ties to stakeholders is widespread and normalized. You frequently exchange text messages of no specific purpose with your boss in order to gain intimacy and trust. You invite significant others around you to banquets of social significance to strengthen brotherly sentiments. You make sure to attend all events of personal significance to your business partners so that they value your friendship and extend their contacts with you. More illicitly, you contact reviewers to ask for a favorable evaluation of an application for a grant, a book award, or a talent outline of nationally endowed professorships on behalf of your colleagues or former students. The last of these actions is unethical, for it violates the formal rules about the conflict of interest and personal interference. In China, these rules are documented but not implemented forcefully. When an overseas returnee professor failed to get his grant application awarded, he was informally told by one of the reviewers, a former classmate of his, that “we all saw [but did not read] your application, it was good, but you didn't call [to contact us], so we were not sure how serious you were!”
A Working Definition of Guanxi
At its basic level, guanxi refers to a dyadic, particular, and sentimental tie that has the potential for facilitating the exchange of favors between the two parties connected by the tie. To Chinese people inside or outside mainland China, any blood or marital relationship qualifies for this definition; hence, kin ties are highly likely to be guanxi ties of varying degrees of closeness. Persons linked by a non-kin tie, on the other hand, can develop guanxi between them if the parties repeatedly invest sentiments in the tie and at the same time build up mutual obligations to each other, making the tie special to both parties. The word “special” here means personal and personalized, or what sociologists term “particular” (Parsons 1937/1949).
When guanxi goes beyond the dyadic basis to connect more than two persons, a guanxi network emerges. In conventional social network analysis (SNA) terms, a guanxi network is an egocentric network in which a focal actor (ego) is connected to two or more other actors (alters) who are connected to still others. Before taking a SNA approach to conceptualizing guanxi into generalizable social science variables, let us first explore the culture-specific meanings of guanxi.
Guanxi As Local Knowledge
A colloquial term, guanxi is what Geertz (1983) calls “local knowledge.” For Geertz, local knowledge is confined to people within a specific culture, and is embedded in the spoken and unspoken symbols and meanings as well as explicit and implicit codes of behavior of the local people.
Guanxi-Relevant Colloquial Terms
Two parties connected by a mutually recognized guanxi tie tend to have at least three interrelated feelings toward each other: (1) ganqing (affection), or feelings of affection one has toward the other party; (2) renqing (favor), or feelings of reciprocal obligation one owes to the other party; and (3) mianzi (face), or feelings of respect one gains from the other party when affections are rewarded and expected obligations fulfilled. Inversely, ganqing is hurt when affections go in one direction, renqing is considered nonexistent when expected obligations are never recognized or favors never returned, and mianzi is lost when attitudes and actions of ignorance or rejection are signaled or implied by the other party. These negative relational processes ultimately lead to the dissolution of a guanxi tie. Thus, guanxi is dynamic rather than static, and its effectiveness and duration depend on sentimental and behavioral exchanges between the parties involved.
Guanxi building is the process of developing mutual affection, strengthening reciprocal obligation, and increasing mutual respect between the parties that are connected by a tie. During one's life course, new members may be added to and old members eliminated from one's guanxi networks. For example, guanxi ties can be developed from among classmates (同学tong xue), comrades-in-arms (战友zhan you), work colleagues (同事tong shi), and countrymen (同乡tong xiang). In rural villages, the exchange of gifts has become a way of life in maintaining social relationships with kin and neighbors (Yan 1996; Kipnis 1997), and the persistence of this lifestyle follows the norm of mutual reciprocity through frequent inter-household interactions at life-cycle events of local significance, which has been characterized by the colloquial term 礼尚往来 “lishang wanglai” (Chang 2010: 226–7 for table V-1). In Mao's urban society, in which redistributive resources were allocated through the work-unit system (Bian 1994a), work colleagues were a greater source of perceived support than the family or kinship (Ruan 1998). In both rural and urban societies, friends are a broad category of multiple cultural meanings and behavioral implications (Smart 1993), but very close friends are likely to become pseudo-kin by addressing each other as brothers or sisters, especially among northerners (Bian 2010). To be sure, guanxi building is a behavioral art, requiring interpersonally justified strategies in such social interactions as conversations, banquets, and gift exchanges. The so-called “art of guanxixue” (关系学, Yang 1994) is about these strategies of guanxi cultivation, maintenance, and utilization at interpersonal levels.
One colloquial term is hard to translate into an understandable English word. This is gan qin (干亲), which may mean “nominal kin” or “ritualized kin” to the best of my English understanding. It refers to the conversion of a non-kin tie into a kin tie through a ritualized ceremony either in private or in public. One example is the conversion of a master–apprentice relation into a ritualized father–son relation, in which the apprentice begins calling the master干爸爸 (gan pa-pa) or干爹 (gan die) and behaves as an adopted son of the master. Another example is the conversion of close friends into “sworn brothers” (把兄弟, ba xiongdi), in which friends recognize each other as brothers and treat each other accordingly. While ritualized kin relations prevailed in official and underground societies before the 1949 Communist revolution, they were nearly eliminated under Mao's regime (1949–76) in which the term “comrade” was used to address each other in social relationships (Vogel 1965). Reform-era China has observed the replacement of “comrades” with “friends” in formal and informal appellations (Gold 1985) and the revival of ritualized kin relations in official and unofficial societies at local levels (Feng 2010).
Three relational manifestations can characterize guanxi ties (Bian 2010). First, guanxi ties connect people of a high level of acquaintance or familiarity (shu); these are the people who know each other very well. Second, guanxi ties connect people of high intimacy (qin), whether they are close kin or, if not, treat each other as pseudo-kin. Intimacy in Chinese guanxi culture is equivalent to family, as evidenced by the popular slang phrase “亲如一家” (qinru yijia, felt like one family). A similar phrase was used for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, “One World, One Family” (世界一家亲 shijie yijia qin). Third, guanxi ties connect people of high trust (xin); in other words, these are the people who are accountable for each other. Each of these relational manifestations is measurable in terms of both subjective evaluation and objective behavior. In this sense, guanxi as a particular tie is a combination of high acquaintance, high intimacy, and high trust, and this combination redefines guanxi as a standard SNA concept that minimizes cultural specificities (Wellman, Chen, and Dong 2002).
Cardinal Relations and Confucian Roots of Relational Ethics
Many of the codes of guanxi-relevant behavior just discussed are deeply rooted in Confucianism, the dominant ancient Chinese philosophy. Unlike the Greek philosophical tradition, which is centered on ontological and epistemological questions, the Confucian philosophical school is centrally concerned with ideal-typical human relations through which to maintain social harmony in official and unofficial societies (Tu 1993). To Confucius, human beings are good in nature, but individuals are teachable and improvable through the cultivation of virtue and the maintenance of ethics. Social roles are fundamentally unequal in social status, and a harmonious social order is established and maintained when human actors of different social roles and unequal social status interact with one another according to the Confucian ethical codes of behavior. Five pairs of social roles are considered by Confucian scholars to be the most important in a family-centered society, resulting in “five cardinal relations” (五伦) as presented in table 1.1.
Table 1.1:
Confucian Concepts of Relational Ethics, Virtues, and Characters
The first pair of roles consists of the ruler and the ruled. Key to this pairwise relation is the upholding of righteousness and the moral disposition to be good. That is, the ruler is benevolent to the ruled, who in turn will be loyal to the ruler. The second pair of roles consists of father and son. When father and son are bound by familial love, a loving father will be loved by his faithful son. The third pair of roles consists of husband and wife. Distinctive in their duties, the husband needs to show benevolence toward his wife and the wife needs to respect the husband with thorough obedience. The fourth pair of roles consists of brother and brother. In this pair, the elder brother is expected to love the younger brother, who in return pays respect to the elder. Finally, the fifth pair of roles consists of friend and friend. Trustworthiness or accountability is to be expected between friends.
Hierarchical ties are clearly characteristic of the first four cardinal relations. Although the friend-to-friend relation is not prescribed as hierarchical, it is implicitly not a relation for people of equal social status either. In Confucian thought on social order, the family is the center of social structure, and social relations beyond the family mimic and are modeled after family relations. While the ruler–ruled relation mimics the father–son relation, the friend–friend relation is modeled after the brother–brother relation, in which the elder brother is of higher status than the younger. Under this Confucian code of conduct, male friends in close relationships address each other as elder/younger brothers and behave accordingly, not just among gentlemen in imperial China but also among Chinese Communist revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong, Zhang Guotao, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De (Zhang 1980). This influence of Confucianism has gone beyond China, as hierarchical social relations are characteristic of other East Asian cultures (Bian and Ikeda 2014/2016).
Connections of Unequals and the Ideal of Social Harmony
The Confucian-prescribed relations are essentially relations of unequal social status (Yan 2006). This is clearly evidenced by the three-obediences principle, presented in table 1.1. Here, three of the five cardinal relations are redefined in a superior–subordinate relationship: The ruled must obey the ruler, the son must obey his father, and the wife must obey her husband. These three cardinal relations in fact are of a higher order than the other two cardinal relations, which can transform into a superior–subordinate relationship as well: The younger brother must obey his elder brother, and junior friends, by age or social status, must obey senior friends. Therefore, although the Confucian “five constant virtues” appear to apply to all people in society, these virtues (be nice, good, obligated, proper, and accountable to others) are more expected of lower-status people when interacting with higher-status others. Finally, the Confucian code's “eight moral characters” include explicit or implicit emphasis on the hierarchical ordering of kinship, political, and social relationships (e.g. filial piety, sibling piety, loyalty (to ruler)).
The hierarchical structure of Confucian social relations is not meant to break up relational harmony. Relational harmony is a state of equilibrium that is necessary and must be maintained within networks of social relations as well as in society at large (Fei 1947/1992). However, the Confucian framing of relational harmony is the harmony of unequals (和而不同, he er butong), in which social harmony is maintained by heterogeneous egos and alters within a network of particular ties (Pan 1993).
Theoretical Models of Guanxi in The Social Sciences
In comparison to Confucian philosophy, contemporary social science research on guanxi is rather a new tradition. Chinese-language publications of theoretical significance to guanxi scholarship began to emerge in the late 1940s and unfortunately stopped during the Maoist era (1949–76), in which not only was China's social science research taken over by political ideology and orthodox Marxism-Leninism, but many subjects of study, including sociology, were terminated. Only after 1978 did we see the rebirth of sociology and guanxi research in China (Bian and Zhang 2008; Bian 2009). Empirical studies have since been conducted, diverse perspectives offered, and research literature accumulated quickly (Zhang 2011a, 2011b; Feizhou Zhou 2017).
This section is not designed to survey the large body of guanxi literature. My goal here is to summarize diverse perspectives on guanxiinto distinctive theoretical models. These models are designed to minimize cultural specificities and focus on the theoretical properties of guanxi that are generalizable across cultural systems. This intention is inspired by an increasing number of social science researchers of non-Chinese origin who study guanxi (Kipnis 1997; Guthrie 1998; Keister 2001; Gold, Guthrie, and Wank 2002; Wellman, Chen, and Dong 2002; Burt and Burzynska 2017; Burt and Opper 2017), but it is also rooted in my belief that social science models can upgrade culture-specific knowledge to a higher level of scientific inquiry into social phenomena. The three theoretical properties we will explore represent guanxi as: the social extension of familial ties; instrumental particular ties; and asymmetric social exchange. In doing so, I shall make use of the term “guanxi capital.” Following the new research tradition on social capital (Lin 2001b), I define guanxi capital as the social resources that are mobilized by actors from their guanxi networks to help achieve expressive and instrumental goals (Bian 2001).
Guanxi as the Social Extension of Familial Ties
This school of thought argues that the family is the core of social structure and the original source of social relations in Chinese society. Consequently, guanxi is understood as the web of extended familial sentiments and obligations. Proponents of this conception include, in the Chinese-language literature, Fei Xiaotong (1947/1992, translated into English) and Liang Shumin (1949/1986), and in English, Morton H. Fried (1953/1969), C. K. Yang (1959/1965), and Ambrose King (1985, 1991).
Liang (1949) began by recognizing that each person is born into a complex set of relations with parents and other family members. He argued that in China these relations are ethical in nature, combining both sentiment (qing) and obligation (yi). In interaction among family members, sentiments and obligations complement and reinforce each other, creating a harmonious structure that resists confrontation and encourages cooperation within the family. Because group life based on individual interests never became a mode of social organization in China, argued Liang, the ethical relations of familial sentiments and obligations were extended from the family into larger society, becoming characteristic of Chinese culture. Liang thus termed Chinese culture and society ethics-centered (伦理本位 lunli benwei).
Fei (1947/1992) emphasized that the ethical relations of familial sentiments and obligations are egocentric. Therefore, the farther an alter is from an ego's family, the wider the range of the ego's tie to the alter, and the lower the degree of the ego's sentiments and obligations to the alter. Fei called this tendency “the mode of differential associations” (差序格局 chaxu geju). Fried's (1953/1969) study of a county seat in Anhui province before 1949 confirmed that the web of familial and kinship obligations indeed extended into and became the “fabric” of the economic, political, and social organizations of the county seat before the Communist revolution. C. K. Yang's (1959/1965) research on post-revolution Chinese families in Guangdong indicated that agricultural collectivization did not greatly alter this structure, because the unofficial, informal networks of familial and kinship sentiments and obligations provided the social support mechanisms through which peasant families survived in the economy of transition and hardships in the 1950s. King (1985, 1991) argued that the relational ethics of guanxi can explain behavioral patterns of Chinese individuals in post-World War II Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mao's mainland China, pointing to the persistence of guanxi in shaping social life among the Chinese across political regimes.
Because familial obligations and sentiments shape the communities extended from the family and kinship, Lin (2001a) has conceptualized these communities as “pseudo-families.” According to Lin, pseudo-family ties refer to intimate friendships. These ties come about in different ways in rural and urban Chinese societies. In
