GUANXI AS LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

Burt and Burzynska admit that guanxi is a colloquial term. I agree. This also means that guanxi is what Clifford Geertz (Reference Geertz1983) 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. A significant part of local knowledge is tacit (Polanyi, Reference Polanyi1966), especially in Confucian cultures (Nonaka & Takeuchi, Reference Nonaka and Takeuchi1995). Before his passing in 2005, the late Chinese sociologist and anthropologist Fei Xiaotong reminded us that tacit forms of social relations are the key to understanding the Chinese people, their social structures, and social behaviors past and present, and that studying and theorizing these tacit forms and hidden regularities of social relations in Chinese culture is an invaluable opportunity for the next generation of Chinese sociologists to contribute to international sociology (Fei, Reference Fei2003).

Therefore, guanxi as local knowledge requires a grassroots approach as well as diligent fieldwork to explore it before valid conception and measurement can be constructed in the social sciences. Less diligent fieldwork with a fixed theoretical mindset would lead to false conceptualization, as critiqued by Mayfair Yang (Reference Yang2002) on the declining significance of guanxi hypothesis (Guthrie, Reference Guthrie1998). Moreover, local knowledge is not fixed as it reflects social and institutional changes of a given culture. This raises new challenges to guanxi studies since China has experienced tremendous transformation in the past century. For example, the main forms of guanxi ties may have transformed from familial and pseudo-familial ties in the pre-Communist era (Liang, Reference Liang1949/1986), to instrumental particular ties under Mao's regime (Walder, Reference Walder1986), and to ties of asymmetrical social exchange in post-Mao China (Lin, Reference Lin, So, Lin and Poston2001a). A review of this transformation is available in the literature (Bian, Reference Bian, Lin, Cook and Burt2001, in press; Bian & Ikeda, Reference Bian, Ikeda, Alhajj and Springer2017). In light of rapid marketization in twenty-first-century China, researchers have noted emerging forms of guanxi as ties of generalized particularism (Lo & Otis, Reference Lo and Otis2003), purposive network behavior (Chang, Reference Chang2011), and obligatory social exchange (Barbalet, Reference Barbalet2017).

Generalizing these old and new forms of guanxi ties into an integrative social science analysis of guanxi is a difficult research task to carry out. Even more difficult is if such analysis is meant to contribute to a comparative agenda. One issue concerns the different roles that similar SNA measures play across institutional contexts (Granovetter, Reference Granovetter1995). Another issue is the extent to which social capital in the United States and guanxi in China in fact play similar roles in obtaining benefits of favoritism in labor markets (DiTomaso, Reference DiTomaso2013; DiTomaso & Bian, Reference DiTomaso and Bian2016). Still another issue is the level of generalization one can make on whether ‘the codification of scientific knowledge’ (Bell, Reference Bell2002) is national, regional, or global. With East-West comparison in mind, the concept of event contacts suggested by Burt and Burzynska gives us a good point of departure to move forward. How does one define events in the East and West? What events have personal or historical significance in an individual's life course in the East and West? What are the contents and forms of social interaction that are involved in an event that creates contacts of high personal importance in the East and West? Finally, what kinds of contacts would be a guanxi contact of lasting influence in both the East and West?

GUANXI AS NETWORKS OF PARTICULAR TIES

In addition to the concept of event contacts, Burt and Burzynska provide a number of insights into the central features of guanxi. Recognizing that guanxi is multidimensional, they note that ‘guanxi relations involve three qualities: (1) familiarity, intimacy, (2) trust, and (3) mutual obligation’. Inferring from their analysis about the relationship between trust and embedding, they have suggested a new definition of guanxi: ‘A relationship is a guanxi tie to the extent that trust is high and relatively independent of structural embedding’. In my personal communication with him, Burt added the following elaboration: ‘The more that a relationship is high in trust, trust that does not depend on enforcement from surrounding third parties, the relationship is guanxi’. He also noted that ‘the specific contents of the guanxi relationship can vary widely, and there is a lot of interesting discussion to be had here’.

Burt's remarks are encouraging and also helpful for further considering what guanxi is and is not. To me, the basic form of guanxi is a particularistic tie, a tie that involves some kind of personal sentiments and obligations between the parties linked by the tie. In this circumstance, ‘dense descriptions’ (Geertz, Reference Geertz1983) are useful for characterizing the ‘culture specific’ (Parnell, Reference Parnell2005) features of a guanxi tie, as in the case of how friendships may or may not be considered as guanxi in the Chinese culture (Smart, Reference Smart1993). A review of leading scholars’ guanxi studies over the last seven decades has led me to define guanxi as a sentimental tie that has the potential to facilitate favor exchange (Bian, Reference Bian, Beckert and Zafirovski2005). To qualify this definition, a number of characterizations of guanxi can be suggested. A guanxi tie emerges naturally from kinship ties (Fei 1949/Reference Fei1992), and nonkin ties become guanxi ties when the parties develop pseudo-kin sentiments and obligations to each other (Liang, Reference Liang1949/1986, Lin, Reference Lin, So, Lin and Poston2001a). Among both kin and nonkin relations, a guanxi tie survives in repeated, rather than one-time, favor exchanges (Yan, Reference Yan1996). Its duration is long-lasting rather than short-lived (Lin, Reference Lin, So, Lin and Poston2001a); its strength is strong rather than weak (Bian, Reference Bian1997); it tends to be a multiplex tie that mixes multiple forms of face, favor, and reciprocity (Yang, Reference Yang2002); and a certain degree of resource nonredundancy between the two parties sustains a guanxi tie (Bian & Zhang, Reference Bian and Zhang2014). Thus, a guanxi tie is a homophonous tie that links parties with non-redundant resources (Bian, Reference Bian2010).

A tripartite framework is suggested elsewhere to conceptualize guanxi networks as a particular form of social networks (Bian & Zhang, Reference Bian and Zhang2014). There, the three dimensions of social networks include particularism, multiplexity, and reciprocity, and each dimension can change in value as a matter of degree across cultures and societies. Guanxi networks result from high values in all three dimensions and are found to be persistent and resilient in China today (Bian & Huang, Reference Bian and Huang2015; Yang, Reference Yang2002); their non-Chinese equivalents are the ‘old-boy networks’ in Western societies (Saloner, Reference Saloner1985). In Western countries, the more widely available networks are weak-tie networks (Granovetter, Reference Granovetter1995) and structural-hole networks (Burt, Reference Burt2000), but these ‘westernized’ networks do indeed exist in China today and may be on the rise (Lo & Otis, Reference Lo and Otis2003; Qi, Reference Qi2013). Under what institutional conditions do ‘Chinese-ized’ guanxi networks and ‘westernized’ structural-hole networks coexist in China? What role does each of these types of networks play in the social and organizational lives of both Chinese and non-Chinese organizations?

GUANXI AS RESOURCE MOBILIZERS

One consensus that is widely shared by both SNA and guanxi researchers is that social resources are embedded in and can be mobilized from networks of ongoing social relations, and it is the mobilized social resources that generate the expected outcomes in social action (Lin, Reference Lin2001b). The problem with guanxi is that it is multidimensional (Bian & Zhang, Reference Bian and Zhang2014), adaptive to institutional change (Chang, Reference Chang2011; Yang, Reference Yang2002), and therefore variable in relational forms. Here I identify five different relational forms of guanxi in which certain kinds of social resources are embedded and from which they can be mobilized (see also Bian [in press]).

The first and most basic relational form of guanxi is a tie of connectivity (versus dis-connectivity) between two parties, and its embedded resources are mutual recognition and communication between members of a shared community. To measure this level of guanxi, one asks: ‘Are you connected to him or her’? In other words, ‘Do you know each other well’? Guanxi as a tie of connectivity is not unique in China; it is culturally constant.

The second relational form of guanxi is a sentimental tie; its embedded resources are human affections, including sympathy, care, love, and a sense of altruistic, not reciprocal, help to others with whom we are associated. This level of guanxi requires a great amount of everyday interaction among people, but its cross-cultural, cross-national, and cross-regime variations need to be empirically studied. The greater the amount of this level of guanxi in everyday life, the nicer our social worlds will be. Is reform-era China moving toward abandoning this nice aspect of guanxi in favor of the rise of a rationalized and yet uncertain and sometime disastrous market economy?

The third level of guanxi is a sentiment-derived instrumental tie; its embedded resources are substantial help with reciprocal implications and expectations for the parties linked by a guanxi tie. This level of guanxi is highly available from kin and pseudo-kin ties (Lin, Reference Lin, So, Lin and Poston2001a). Here, the mobilization of the embedded resources is the unintended consequences of good relations (Arrow, Reference Arrow1998), and its very logic is against the deliberate guanxi building aimed at instrumental values and outcomes. Is the rise of market economy with Chinese characteristics creating external conditions that oppose the development of this level of guanxi in favor of overt favoritism and naked favor exchange?

The fourth relational form of guanxi is an instrumental-particular tie; its embedded resources vary hugely in type but the norms of reciprocity, face, and favor are primary. This is the widely understood meaning of guanxi in the scholarship on the subject (Hwang, Reference Hwang1987; Walder, Reference Walder1986; Yan, Reference Yan1996; Yang Reference Yang2002). The relational bases of this level of guanxi vary, but the degree of particularism is a positive signal to the start of a possible favor exchange between guanxi parties, nevertheless the norms of reciprocity, besides anything else, are deterministic about the continuation or termination of a guanxi tie. To what extent do these kinds of guanxi ties grow or decline in proportion to the rise of market economy in China, and under what conditions?

The fifth and last level of guanxi is an obligational tie or a well-understood informal contract. Its embedded resources are specific, the generated behaviors are highly patterned, but the relational origins, bases, or forms vary randomly. These kinds of obligational ties have grown tremendously in business circles and political spheres, facilitating land allocations and real estate developments; lubricating construction projects; and contributing to illicit services and dealings, official corruption, and money-for-power-influence exchanges (Barbalet, Reference Barbalet2017; Wank, Reference Wank1999; Wang, Reference Wang2016). These are the ugly face of guanxi and the dark side of guanxi capital. Have these kinds of guanxi practices and guanxi influences stayed within business circles and political confines? Or are they spreading to all economic and social spheres in an increasingly marketized China?