Abstract
In the book Guanxi: How China Works, Professor Yanjie Bian presents a comprehensive review and synthesis of his three-decade research program on guanxi ties, a distinct type of social ties making up a sprawling social fabric stabilizing Chinese society. The book starts with a definition of guanxi tie as “a dyadic, particular, and sentimental tie that has the potential for facilitating the exchange of favors between the two parties connected by the ties” (p. 6), and continues the elaboration of the guanxi concept with detailed applications in four important domains of social life in China: getting a job, business founding, organizational development, and politics. The book concludes with an agenda for future research. This is a fascinating introduction of social life of ordinary Chinese people, and opens a door to understand the structure and functions of Chinese society at large.
Guanxi ties are a distinct type of social ties, derived from and stabilized in the particular logic of social life in China. Guanxi ties do not fit well in the canonical classification of social ties as a dichotomy of strong and weak ties. Granovetter (1973) distinguishes social ties by strength and structural position. In his derivation, the strength and structural position of a social tie are often correlated: a strong tie characterized as an intimate, reciprocal and emotion-laden relationship is found in dense local networks, while a weak tie bridges disconnected parts of a social network and brings in novel information such as where to find a job. This classification of social relationships provides a clean analytical framework for using social relationships to reach economic ends. However, at the same time, the theoretical classification limits its applicability to non-Western contexts in which social relationships become the primary channels for accessing and securing resources that are of utmost importance to the life of individuals. Guanxi in the Chinese society is one of such examples. A guanxi tie, as Bian puts it, has to be simultaneously a strong tie, in which both individuals mutually trust and are emotionally bound to one another, and a long-range tie, funnelling resources that are novel and non-redundant in a local environment. How can this be possible? What are the societal conditions that give rise to this alternate combination of strength and structural position? Guanxi: How China Works offers an attempt in resolving the puzzle with a great wealth of empirical studies, personal stories, and anecdotes.
In Bian’s synthesis, the notion of a guanxi tie needs to be satisfied with three models: social extension of familial ties, instrumental particular ties, and asymmetric social exchange. Guanxi ties connect the individual to resourceful others who possess the right to give job offers, political power for promotion, or who decide which suppliers to work with. Unlike Granovetter’s example of finding a job, these decisions are either illicit, or morally discouraged by the broader society, or highly risky, and the completions of such transactions demand a high level of mutual trust between parties involved. In the first two chapters, Bian offers several key mechanisms that can help sustain the trust between individuals who are not embedded in a network (i.e., they are not connected by many common others who can enforce expected obligations and commitment to the dyadic relationship).
Bian continues to offer a rich collection of empirical studies in important domains of social life. In Chapter 3, he refutes the declining guanxi thesis with an elegant theory of market transition of China from the Maoist redistributive economy, in which one was assigned to new jobs in relatively stable institutional environment, to the market economy, in which one’s prospect of finding a new job is often determined in the hands of officials or managers and the economic institution is unstable. Chapter 4 provides a similar argument that when business owners needs critical and non-redundant resources (e.g., supplies of new parts) in an uncertain market environment, they need to rely on guanxi ties with suppliers, or local officials who have special access to the resources, while these ties have been cultivated in different social eating and guanxi cultivating events long ago.
Chapter 5 focuses on how the role of guanxi ties in formal business organizations serving an “information-flow, trust-building, and obligation-binding function” (p. 135). The chapter further explicates the mechanisms of guanxi ties in the organizational governance, organizational performance, and foreign organizations’ adaptation in guanxi culture. Chapter 6 is to answer the question of how guanxi ties influence politics, especially when decision-making affects positions of governance in local communities and state polity. When the formal system of merit-based promotion is limited, guanxi becomes an important channel that embodies strong trust and intimacy, and provides important and non-redundant political resources.
Guanxi: How China Works is a must-read book in scholarship on Chinese society as it links the micro foundation of social life and important social, economic, and political domains in contemporary China.
