Mutual back-scratching [搞关系]
With more and more westerners now coming to China for doing business, the term guanxi has earned new popularity as they all learn that the success of their endeavor very much depends on how good their guanxi is with their local business partner and local government.
At a time it was difficult to explain guanxi to westerns, with all the social implications that it encompasses. But no longer now, a simple Google search of guanxi returns 667,000 hits! There are countless of websites and books and PR companies who make very exhaustive explanation of this critical concept. From their view, if you’re starting a business in China and you have to decide whether you’re going to take a MBA course or a course on establishing guanxi, the later option will certainly yield much higher return on your investment, as simple as that!
Wikipedia explains guanxi as “describes a personal connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service, or be prevailed upon. The two people need not be of equal social status. Guanxi can also be used to describe be a network of contacts, which an individual can call upon when something needs to be done, and through which he or she can exert influence on behalf of another [...]“.
A well known Chinese sociologist put this as “关系，在社会学意义上，是中国社会中特有的一种人际互动形式，是费孝通差序格局理论中的重要概念。按照费的解释，在传统中国社会中，“社会关系是逐渐从一个一个人推出去的，是私人联系的增加，社会范围是一根根私人联系所构成的网络”.
Those are accurate but boring definitions. I prefer this one from Catherine Jiang of Asia Times: “Guanxi is a term for mutual back-scratching or reciprocal personal or business connections”. The expression mutual back-scratching [互相擦背 = 擦鞋 = 擦屁股 = 拍马屁] might be very cantonese, but I think it truely reflects my feeling about this concept. It also reminds me of monkeys in the zoos, they do mutual back-scratching all the time, or sometime they help each others seeking for louse. Maybe we’ve inherit that from them…
Here again, a photo is worth thousand words!
