Guanxi

Guanxi (simplified Chinese: 关系; traditional Chinese: 關係; pinyin: guānxì) is a term used in Chinese culture to describe an individual's social network of mutually beneficial personal and business relationships. 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. 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. 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).

Guanxi has not always been a guaranteed way of conducting business in China and Southeast Asia, especially for foreigners from the west. During the 1990s, Guanxi was frequently disregarded for American business leaders when dealing with local officials. Corruption replaced Guanxi in the form of tangible or monetary gifts.

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.

Guanxi has three 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 (信任 xìnrèn/hsin-jen), or the amount of interpersonal trust. 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, 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.