It has a lot in common with corruption but in a communist state it is the norm. Because communism fails at selecting performance, nothing really works and the state institutions are the first affected, but it spreads eventually in the whole society. Thus, the only way to get something is as a favor from someone. You don't go to the institution but you go to someone who "works" there.

So another way to describe these guanxi is : networks of influence with favors as money.

I'm always amused when people project a Western-centric viewpoint when talking about China. This has very little to do with Communism and everything to do with China's own history and cultural development.

Chinese culture has always placed a strong emphasis on interpersonal relationships because institutions besides the state have always been relatively weak, and the agents of the state formed a close-knit, elite class that interacted with one another personally.

For over two thousand years, the state bureaucracy has been the strongest institution in China at the local levels. Even during the Nationalist period and in pre-modern times, you'd better believe the average person would a good relationship with their local official if they wanted to get anything done effectively.

Controlling nepotism and corruption within the bureaucracy has been a perennial concern during every single dynasty of China, going all the way to the Qin dynasty in 200 B.C.

Also, you definitely need good interpersonal networks to do business effectively in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, despite the fact that none of those polities have experienced direct Communist rule.

The Communists in China were actually markedly less corrupt than the Nationalist officials they replaced, and in fact the corruption of the Nationalist administration was one reason they lost the Civil War.

Remember that China was still basically a pre-industrial nation in 1949 -- it's hard to have impartial, clean institutions in a nation of China's size without modern communications and mass culture.

I'm pretty sure Romania was a more modern place than China was before WW2, so imposing a Communist system was a step backwards, but that doesn't generalize to China's experience.

So yes, Romanian experience is very relatable to this aspect of China.

[*] i.e. which unobtainable food items are coveted most.

The funny thing is that all communist countries used to be very bureaucratic; however Max Weber says that there is a blessing in bureaucracy - it is supposed to be impersonal, so in theory it should be objective and be able to ignore personal biases/preferences, provided that you just stick to the procedures. Now Guanxi seems to take the better of that theory.

> Max Weber says that there is a blessing of bureaucracy - it is supposed to be impersonal, so in theory it should be objective and just ignore personal biases/preferences provided that you stick to the procedures.

Oddly enough it was bureaucracy that was cementing life order in socialist bloc in identical way, and Guanxi/personal corruption is a manifestation of it. This really stems as consequence of implementation of Marxist tenets and I maintain is deterministic and unavoidable. It seems many can't really comprehend how big a footprint Communist effort leaves after its gone. Historic and cultural continuity is typically destroyed or at least mauled. All ex-communist countries have shared experience in the same way all rape victims regardless background have it.

My father would strongly disagree. Communists paid for his education from elementary school and up to college, and made sure he didn't end up doing small scale agriculture like his parents and grandparents.

Before 1940 Romania did have some industry, capital and civilization, true. But if counted by either population or area, a supermajority was simply subsistence agriculture. Communists razed it down, built industry and mechanized agriculture in its place, and crammed people into cities and towns. I'd guess that up to the early 70s it was actually a force for progress, even if only for breaking up old power structures.

After that it was the usual trade-off - less appliances, electronics and luxury goods, but a more relaxed and secure life style. Until 1980, when rumor has it that Ceausescu visited North Korea and fell in love with it. After that things changed, he pushed strongly for full debt payment, and the population suffered.

At least for me, it's more like a communist thing with Chinese flavor than a Chinese thing with communism flavor.

Actually it is more complicated than it appears. As you can see, the whole urbanization process of China happens after communist took power. Many rules in the cities are new, and it's hard to say that the rules take places because of Chinese culture or because of communism, usually both.

One thing that is certainly communism-related is that, because of planned economy and a very restricted market, some very basic things were on a shortage and you need "guanxi" for that. My mom recalls that 40 yrs ago ladies wanted to marry butchers (or the one who sells pork), just because they got more power due to the position they were on. You see Radu mentioned that people get extra half bread due to relations. My parents used to need ticket to buy rice and pork etc. That's where you need some "guanxi" to do basic things. Also, to go to hospitals one needs some "guanxi" because medical resources are limited (and price where controlled). Should it be a free market, private hospitals would be built and shortage would fall.

TL;DR: Because communist countries government grab so much power in their hands, "guanxi" plays a more important role than it used to be.

The importance of a relatively free market should never be underestimated. And Chinese people certainly needs a smaller government. Even today, the market is not as free as it could be and the government is still taking too much power (they made a lot of progress with that power though). It's a much bigger government than any democrats would imagine, bigger than a big government in American common sense!

For example in Thailand I see Guanxi all the time, granted that it's firmly in the Chinese sphere-of-influence. But I bet if you go to some Central America Bureaucracy and you'll see the same thing.

In communist societies this functional mechanism is quasi inexistent and the only thing that keeps that society running is the guanxi . China may have its specific form but I'd say that it is rooted in our deeper human pshichological traits that are common to all of us.

I live in an ex-communist state and we're still struggling with such a guanxi that trancends all major political parties and state institutions, after 26 years since we've "transitioned to democracy".

The major problem is that this close-knit, closed, state parasite is blocking any change and any advancement in society.

Actually, that happens in all sort of societies that are not Legal-Rational Liberal-Capitalist.

I'm not sure you got it right. Price discrimination and other market mechanisms existed, more or less, in communist societies too. The problem was that there was this seller's market. A lot of things were scarce, be it natural or artificial scarcity (a gatekeepers induced one), and besides the fact that the supplier could inflate the price a lot, you still had to have connections to have a chance to the bid. Excluding the communist idealistic selfless individuals that did their job as best as they could indiscriminately, the norm was for people to leverage their positions. For one, this way they created "markets" for their supplied services or access to goods. For another, this is how you get what you have or do to worth anything in the eyes of others. So this was besides the currency based market. It was a favor based market that overlapped the first.

You had the Church vying against various pre-modern states for political power, and in the shuffle there were also entire towns and regions that had de facto autonomy, as well as guilds and other medieval institutions that were allowed to mind their own business.

In that vigorous competitive environment, you would expect that cleaner, less corrupt, and more transparent institutions would tend to survive. The way these institutions worked were aggressively copied across Europe, as nations vigorously competed with one another to modernize and survive.

In that framework, you would see Communism as a big step back -- instead of clean, independent institutions on the 'Western' model, just replace everything with the state.

China, on the other hand, was basically still a pre-modern state into the 20th century, and hadn't had non-corrupt institutions since the mid Qing dynasty. Pre-modern China had no large nationwide institutions except the state -- its communications technology lagged Europe's, and it also had a huge population.

Just over a hundred years ago, the de facto ruler of China, the Empress Dowager Cixi took all the funds earmarked for naval fleets and dumped into building a palace instead.

The Chinese Nationalists who eventually overthrew her in 1911 spent the next few decades failing to control endemic corruption at all levels of government. One of the reasons that the Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war was due to the deep dissatisfaction everyone had at their pervasive corruption.

In fact, corruption at the bottom rungs of the bureaucracy basically didn't exist under Mao and was aggressively weeded out--corrupt officials were regularly imprisoned and shot. For the average Chinese person, Communist rule, despite its own problems, was a large step forward in terms of quality of life and quality of governance.

TL;DR - Communism in Eastern Europe was probably a step back, but in China it was an improvement on what existed before. Guanxi is how things get done when you don't have strong institutions.

Totally agree.

I am saying that from a point on, guanxi is the reason you don't have strong institutions, precisely because they tend to form close-knit circles of power that prevent the forming of strong institutions. It's a vicious circle.

Although behaviours, expectations and social constructs vary, we're all human so most probably those of course are not unique to China, but they have a word for it. Like "zeitgeist", "amok", "bon vivant", "maelstrom" or "karma", some things are just untranslatable and warrant bringing the word-concept to other languages as is, crystallising something that certainly existed prior into something that suddenly acquires a more precise (or at the very least less diffuse) shape in the mind, that we can tie nuances to.

- In the west we usually identify distinct types of influence. We even have special words for particular kinds of influence. Nepotism, cronyism, old boys networks, etc. These identify particular types of connection and particular forms of influence. Friendship through a golf club or university hall would be a characteristic aspect of an old boys network, for example. In Finland, you might think of a 'sauna clique' business culture. Also, we think about these types of relationships independently. Someone might be proud of their 'old boy' connections but intolerant of nepotism, seeing one as earned and the other as given. In contrast, guanxi is more of a melting pot. It could mean a lot of things. It's more like the word 'sway' or 'pull' in English, in a networking sense. It incorporates cronyism, family duty, nepotism, friendship, business connections, political power...

- Moral connotations can be completely different. Guanxi is a good thing sometimes, bad thing other times. Giving a key job to your son is bad in a Western company, arguably 'good' in the East. Providing he's not useless.

- You don't leave business networks at the door of the house; guanxi networks permeate friendship/family/business connections. You might not normally introduce a business colleague to a member of your family, in the west. This relates to my earlier point about it being less structured than Western influence systems.

- Reciprocity matters. Let's say I do you a big favour. You pay me back the next day by giving me a set of tickets to get a nice dinner somewhere. By maintaining a balanced relationship we remain friends. In Chinese culture this would be a bit of a faux pas. By repaying immediately and at a similar level to the gift received, you're basically extinguishing the opportunity to develop guanxi immediately - an unfriendly act. Where western relationships tend to be balanced, and quickly, Chinese relationships instead seem to prosper through periods of imbalance, overpayment back, and so on. The scales should not be balanced, they should sway back and forward. This dynamic is characteristic of a good friendship or a good guanxi connection.

Source: sat at the back of a 10-week course on Chinese business studies, during my PhD, and had a friend whose master's thesis topic was contrasting guanxi with western-style 'leverage'. No citations, feel welcome to treat it as hearsay. :)

I don't know what the final dissertation title/theme ended up as, but we talked a lot about guanxi vs other similar cultural behaviours while he was writing it.

Option A) The wife of a former president

vs.

Option B) A former close friend & financial donor to the same former president.

Chinese guanxi looks pretty tame compared to the US race for 'most powerful person in the world'. :-)

In that scene, somebody wants the Don to go beat the shit out of somebody who beat the shit out of his daughter, and offers to pay money.

In response, the Don asks what he has done to make the other guy disrespect him so.

Guanxi is all about building relationships, not mercenary transactions. In asian culture, if you toss somebody some money for a transaction or a favor, you're treating him disrespectfully as an employee.

From the Wikipedia page, the most useful paragraph in describing the differences is probably the second paragraph under "Western vs. Eastern social business relations": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi#Western_vs._Eastern_soc...

It's useful because it uses a framework for understanding relationships in either culture: trust, bonding, reciprocity, and empathy. Western guanxi and Chinese guanxi can be understood through this framework. While I'm open to the idea that it's a flawed framework, it proves my point that Western culture has analogous social expectations. Less like beet sugar and aspartame and more like bat wings and bird wings - both shaped differently, both used differently, but for the same function. I am interested in the differences, but there will be a fair amount of structural similarities.

I also disagree with your characterization of this perspective as being "very western." Considering guanxi as something fundamentally different from how Western culture works is Eurocentric - very Western, as you had said. Stepping back and analyzing how informal Western reputation systems work in the same light as how guanxi works in China is a way of de-centering the Western perspective and removing the exoticism from Chinese culture.

From my outsider perspective, it's not that there is no western analog; rather the meaning changes with context and therefore it is difficult to translate as a single concept (in English at least).

From your response above, I think that you're correct (from my experience) in saying it is "trust, bonding, reciprocity, and empath", just not necessarily at the same time.

Sometimes it's "trust", sometimes its "nepotism". But it's definitely fluid.

"In the Western perspective, trust is referred to as mutual reliability, dependability, and reciprocity. However, in the Eastern perspective, trust is also synonymous with obligation, in which guanxi is expected to be maintained through continuous long-term association and interaction. Whereas bonding in a Western context may refer simply to common interests with the client, bonding in an Eastern context refers to a close friendship with the client. The Chinese system of wu-lune (the basic norms of guanxi) supports this Eastern attitude, emphasizing that one’s fulfillment of one’s responsibilities in a given role ensures the smooth functioning of Chinese society. Reciprocity is also a dimension which is much more emphasized in the East than in the West. According to Confucianism, each individual is encouraged to become a yi-ren (righteous person) and repay a favor with significantly more than one has received. Lastly, empathy is a dimension that is highly embedded in Eastern business relations, more so than in its Western counterpart. The Confucian understanding of ren, which also equates to “Do not do to others as one does not want others to do to him”, stresses the importance for sellers and customers to understand each other’s needs.[19]"