Guanxi

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. In Western media, the pinyin romanization guanxi is more widely used than common translations such as "connections" or "relationships" because those terms don't capture the significance of a person's guanxi to most personal and business dealings in China. Unlike in the West, guanxi relationships cannot be 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. 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 and businesses owned by Overseas Chinese people in Southeast Asia (the bamboo network).


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.

Closely related concepts include ganqing, a measure which reflects the depth of feeling within an interpersonal relationship, renqing (人情 rénqíng/jen-ch'ing), the moral obligation to maintain a relationship, and 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 wu-lune, 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.