Gifts, Favors, and Banquets : The Art of Social Relationships in China

An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called __guanxi__, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of __guanxi__ stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Fieldwork, Politics, and Modernity in China The "Discovery" of Guanxixue Guanxixue as an Object of Study Fieldwork in a Culture of Fear The Subject-Position of the Anthropologist State Projects of Modernity in China and Native Critiques Part I: An Ethnography of Micropolitics in a Socialist Setting 1. Guanxi Dialects and Vocabulary Popular Discourse Official Discourse Key Words and Concepts of Guanxixue in Popular Discourse 2. The Scope and Use-Contexts of Guanxi The City and the Countryside The Gender Dimension Urban Occupational Strata The Variety of Use-Contexts A Society of Gatekeepers Corporate and Administrative Uses 3. The "Art" in Guanxixue: Ethics, Tactics, and Etiquette Guanxi Bases: Kinship, Friendship, and Other Personal Relations Affective Sentiments: Yiqi, Ganqing, and Renqing Enlarging a Guanxi Network The Tactic, Obligation, and Form of Giving and Receiving The Obligation to Repay 4. On the Recent Past of Guanxixue: Traditional Forms and Historical (Re-)Emergence Three Official Histories Guanxixue and Chinese Culture The Postrevolutionary Decline and Rise of Guanxixue From "Use-Value" to "Exchange-Value": The Entrance of Market Forces The Art of Guanxi Does Not Retreat Part II: Theoretical Formulations 5. The Political Economy of Gift Relations The Techniques of Power in the State Redistributive Economy Countertechniques in the Gift Economy Propositions 6. "Using the Past to Negate the Present": Ritual Ethics and State Rationality in Ancient China "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius" A Reinterpretation of the Past 7. The Cult of Mao, Guanxi Subjects, and the Return of the Individual A Sweep of Red: State Subjects and the Cult of Mao The Return of the Individual Subject Guanxi Subjectivity of Addition and Subtraction 8. Rhizomatic Networks and the Fabric of an Emerging Minjian in China In-between the Individual and Society In-between the Individual and Groups or Associations Rhizomatic Kinship and Guanxi Polity: From Guanxi Networks to a Minjian Conclusion: Back to the Source The Female Supple Force of Exchange Ritual as a Self-organizing Vehicle of the Minjian Renqing over Guanxi Glossary Chinese and Japanese Bibliography English Bibliography Index An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy. | An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi , underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity.

Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.