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

The Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture

by Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang

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.

Genres: China, Anthropology

384 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1994

Reviews

[Selah Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Gary Bruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a truly great ethnography of a large, complex civilization, that of modern China. Yang guides the reader through the practices and expectations inherent in Guanxi, which can loosely be translated into English as 'networking' or 'connections'. Loosely. In fact the art of Guanxi has much to do with the human side of the massive Chinese (post-) communist bureaucracy. In essence, nothing would get done in China without the 'Gifts, Favors, and Banquets' which serve as the social lubricant in business and government dealings. Partly reliant on the Maussean discovery that any gift creates an obligation to reciprocate, Guanxi in practice means that there is a kind of informal favor-accounting to all public and private business. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. One interesting aspect of this relates to the general perception that Guanxi constitutes a form of corruption or a throwback to the age of Imperial China. True enough. But the book places emphasis on the need of Guanxi in order to break the ice and create a social relationship in the face of strong inertial tendencies. Sure, some school building might possibly collapse because a banquet served the place of a building inspection, but the point seems to be that in today's Leviathan that is China, there isn't really a better way. For example, the book reveals part of the secret of China's new found capitalist success. Through a network of favors, workers are enabled to borrow extra capacity for private ends in the communist run economy: unused vehicles, unneeded machinery, extra space in the warehouse. This creates a flexibility and efficiency in capacity utilization that capitalism should be jealous of. Flexible ideas of ownership and obligation have resulted in a sonic boom of commerce in an economy that was moribund two generations ago.

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite its unsatisfactory parts, this book probably can stay. For this reason I would like to give it 4.5 stars. I think the best part of this book is that while "guanxi" is de-centering, MFY never quite loses her focus on the workings of power revealed by the the workings of guanxi. I think it is not an easy task. And her discussion indeed increases my understanding of the working of Chinese state and its modern dilemmas.