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Guanxi (simplified Chinese: 关系; traditional Chinese: 關係; pinyin: guānxi) is a term used in Chinese culture to describe an individual's social network of mutually beneficial personal and business relationships.[1][2] The character guan, 关, means "closed" and "caring" while the character xi 系 means "system" and together the term refers to a closed caring system of relationships that is somewhat analogous to the term old boy's network in the West.[3] In Western media, the pinyin romanization guanxi is more widely used than common translations such as "connections" or "relationships" because those terms do not capture the significance of a person's guanxi to most personal and business dealings in China. Unlike in the West, guanxi relationships are almost never established purely through formal meetings but must also include spending time to get to know each other during tea sessions, dinner banquets, or other personal meetings. Essentially, guanxi requires a personal bond before any business relationship can develop. As a result, guanxi relationships are often more tightly bound than relationships in Western personal social networks.[4][5] Guanxi has a major influence on the management of businesses based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and those owned by Overseas Chinese people in Southeast Asia (the bamboo network).[6]
Guanxi and guanxi networks are grounded in Confucian doctrine about the proper structure of family, hierarchical, and friendly relationships in a community, including the need for implicit mutual commitments, reciprocity, and trust.[7]
Guanxi has 3 sub-dimensions sometimes abbreviated as GRX which stands for ganqing, a measure of the emotional attachment in a relationship, renqing (人情 rénqíng/jen-ch'ing), the moral obligation to maintain a relationship with reciprocal exchange of favors, and xinren, or the amount of interpersonal trust.[8] Guanxi is also related to the idea of "face" (面子, miànzi/mien-tzu), which refers to social status, propriety, prestige, or a combination of all three. Other related concepts include wulun (Chinese: 五倫; pinyin: wǔlún), the five cardinal types of relationships,[9]: 133 which supports the idea of a long term, developing relationship between a business and its client, and yi-ren and ren, which respectively support reciprocity and empathy.
- ^ "The Most Misunderstood Business Concept In China". Business Insider. US-Pacific Rim International, Inc. Retrieved 2022-01-26.
- ^ Burt, Ronald S.; Opper, Sonja (2024). "Guanxi and Structural Holes: Strong Bridges from Relational Embedding". American Journal of Sociology. 130 (1): 1–43. doi:10.1086/730630. ISSN 0002-9602.
- ^ Girard, Bonnie. "Why the US-China Trade Negotiations Are Stuck". The Diplomat. Retrieved 2022-01-27.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Gold, Thomas 2002was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ "Chinese business values: Guanxi, mianzi, renqing". Asia Media Centre | New Zealand. 22 September 2017. Retrieved 2022-01-27.
- ^ H. W-c Yeung (2007). Handbook of Research on Asian Business. Edward Elgar Publishing. p. 412. ISBN 978-1-84720-318-2.
- ^ Luo, Yadong, Ying Huang, and Stephanie Lu Wang. "Guanxi and Organisational Performance: A Meta-Analysis." Management and Organization Review 8.1 (2011): 139–72. Print.
- ^ Yen, Dorothy A.; Abosag, Ibrahim; Huang, Yu-An; Nguyen, Bang (2017-10-01). "Guanxi GRX (ganqing, renqing, xinren) and conflict management in Sino-US business relationships". Industrial Marketing Management. 66: 103–114. doi:10.1016/j.indmarman.2017.07.011. ISSN 0019-8501.
- ^ Bell, Duran (February 2000). "Guanxi: A Nesting of Groups" (PDF). Current Anthropology. 41 (1): 132–138. doi:10.1086/300113.