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A comment on Alibaba Buys South China Morning Post. Parent comment

Re:Alibaba Buys South China Morning Post by shostack on Friday December 11, 2015 @05:01PM (#10720414)
As someone with only passing familiarity of the concept of "guanxi," is it even possible to grow a business to that size in China and be that successful without being corrupt or participating in/facilitating corruption? Or at that level of the game is it entirely possible to succeed with "legal" forms of guanxi?

Seems like a cultural concept where to get ahead it is very much "damned if you do, damned if you don't" because of what I imagine is an inherently escalating nature to it.

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Re:Alibaba Buys South China Morning Post by swuecho on Friday December 11, 2015 @09:21PM (#10721501)
guanxi and corruption is not the same. you hard to do thing without guanxi (kind of good relationship). guanxi is part of chinese culture, more like, long term relationship.
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Re:Alibaba Buys South China Morning Post by Thriptic on Friday December 11, 2015 @11:02PM (#10721743)
Can you elaborate on what guanxi entails?
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Re:Alibaba Buys South China Morning Post by gbog on Saturday December 12, 2015 @05:50AM (#10722363)
Guanxi really just mean "relation". In this context, it means long term business relations alloing for trust and mutual respect, where each part knows that the other part will return favors and keep the relation balanced. It also, as a side-effect, facilitate corruption, but it does not imply it. The Chinese have a long culture of managing social relations, so this side is very developped, but you have the same in higher society in Europe.
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