Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi. Edited by Thomas Gold, Doug Guthrie, and David Wank. [New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. 276 pp. £16.95. ISBN 0521-53031-8.]

Extract

This collection about guanxi in China is timely. It is timely because, as studies of social networks have reached maturity, it is important to reconsider the relevance of guanxi to social organization and change in China, especially since China has experienced such radical social and economic transformations in the last three decades. It is timely also because there is now increasing discussion about the possibilities of understanding non-Western societies with non-Western analytical categories, and about the strategies of resolving the tension between the particular and the universal. So guanxi, as the Chinese expression of the universal practice of building interpersonal relationships, may serve as a good example of understanding a social feature in specific cultural-institutional contexts and at a more universal level. The authors of this book have dealt with these issues in three broad ways.

The first is to see if the instrumental and emotional dimensions of guanxi offer a more satisfying analysis than one based on extreme rationalism. The authors who took on this issue made useful distinctions between the perception, practice, and real effects of guanxi. For these authors, guanxi is a good way to understand the ambivalence of, and shifts between, the rational and the emotional in social relations, and between behaviour and discourse in social analysis. It remains a great challenge, however, to use the concept of guanxi as an analytical category to resolve the tension between the deep ambivalence of human relations and the methodological clarity demanded by many social scientists.