Tuesday, November 11, 2003
MEI YOU GUANXI
ChinaBiz has a brief little essay about guanxi, that element of Chinese society that so many westerners have such a hard time grasping and dealing with. What is guanxi? That's one of those questions that I feel like I both know too much about and not enough about to even write one word. Technically and in isolation, the word "guanxi" means "relation" or "relationship." In the context used in the ChinaBiz article, it means that network of personal relationships based on some shared experience or family background that Chinese people look to as a web in which to embed trust. "Trust" being the key word -- and the title of the Francis Fukuyama book mentioned in the article I push on anyone who will listen to me for five minutes on the subject of the "culture matters" approach to the world of which I have become a zealous advocate. But guanxi can mean other things, as in the slightly humorous title of this post, literally translated as "it has no relation," but which translates correctly to the English phrase "it doesn't matter," or "never mind."
Guanxi is one of the chief obstacles in the way of western-style social, business and political dealings in China that is interpreted by westerners as opacity and part of the famous "mysteriousness of the East." A westerner doesn't "get it" in a multi-party transaction because there will often be either more or less trust than she expects -- she's missing the workings of guanxi. In the absence of guanxi, things move more slowly than a westerner will expect, while the presence of guanxi will make things happen more quickly than anticipated -- and more "mysteriously."
The much-vaunted "transparency" campaign pushed by the World Bank and IMF in Asia in the aftermath of the Asian economic melt-down of the 1990s was really a war against guanxi. And so far, it's been a losing war. In that, I agree with the author of the ChinaBiz article linked above: Guanxi is alive and well. The workings of guanxi serve many of the same functions that westerners place in a larger, more diffuse and (in some cases) more abstract "civil society," so much so that "cronyism" and "old boy networks" are negative terms in the west, while in Asia, they would fairly accurately describe the workings of the invisible, interlocking networks of guanxi by which the world works. Still today, in Asia, if you don't have guanxi, it doesn't matter.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:28 PM
