It’s not only friendship that creates Guanxi
By Ron Cune
One of the most widely discussed subjects about doing business with Chinese people is the concept ‘Guanxi’. Literally ‘Guanxi’ means “being closed into a system”.
Not without reason, the term Guanxi often isn’t translated into English. In some occasions Guanxi is translated as ‘networking’, but that doesn’t really get to the deeper meaning of the word. While networking is based on knowing which person does what, Guanxi is based on the right to ask for a favour. Furthermore, Guanxi relates to someone’s background, work relations, family matters and relations that have nothing to do with friendship. Being aware a favour from the other party can be asked for, is the essence of Guanxi.
The foundation of Guanxi is the faith that one favour will be exchanged for another some day by each party involved. Therefore Guanxi is almost only used when favours need to be exchanged.
Friendship is just one out of many possibilities that allows one to ask favours. The criteria that defines a good friendship, is the possibility to trust and rely on each other. The friendship created by ‘Guanxi’ is not in the least comparable to ‘networking’ as we know that in the West. Guanxi based solely on friendship, will take years to establish. Businessmen who expect to create Guanxi by having dinners or spending time in Karaoke bars might create goodwill, but not Guanxi.
Guanxi can develop when you help a Chinese acquaintance to get a visa in your country or when you provide a job to the child of a business relation. These examples create ‘light’ Guanxi. The level of effort and difficulty determines the level of Guanxi.
Needless to say, Western companies do not have a wide range of access possibilities for Guanxi at the first stages of doing business in China. Also many companies are not familiar with the requests of those ‘favours’ that often don’t match the social accepted values of doing business in Europe. Recruiting employees with the right Guanxi is the fastest way of establishing a Guanxi network. That is why certain persons from a social network with a specific family background are highly wanted regardless their capabilities and qualifications.
Best is to leave Guanxi up to your Chinese partners and employees. They know the game and the right approach.
For most foreign business people, being involved in general networking activities and relationship maintaining is more than enough.
Ron Cune, DragonDancers
June 6th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Dear Ron,
Absolutely interesting to read your article. For me this is the first time somebody is able to explain where guanxi is realy all about. It is not about frienship, nor about networking. Guanxi is a “I owe you” network or, as you write, it is based on “the right to ask for a favour”.
Regards,
Jef
June 15th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Great article, Ron!
I’m originally from Eastern Europe and would say that what Chinese mean by “guanxi” is called network or “connections” in my region. And the way of doing buisiness here in China and in my country sometimes is very similar :))
August 12th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Hi Ron,
While I applaud your article, I am afraid your interpretation of the literal meaning of ‘guanxi’ 关系 is wrong.
Literally, the term only means ‘relationship’ or ‘connection’ as one integral concept, and can’t be broken down the way you did.
However, I can see where you got your idea from. (A rather creative one, I must say.)
Yes, individually the Chinese characters ‘guan’ 关 could mean what you had stated in the article, i.e., the verb ‘close’ (or ‘being closed’), as in 关闭. However, it could also mean ‘being related to’ or ‘having connection to’, as in 人命关天.
As for the Chinese term for system, ‘xitong’ 系统, yes, it is the same ‘xi’ 系 as that in ‘guanxi’. However, ‘xitong’ is not a ‘native’ Chinese word.
It was both a translation and transliteration of the English word “system” (imagine that!) only relatively recently (around the turn of the last century when the term was first introduced into China).
So logically and chronologically it would not have been possible for ‘guanxi’ 关系 to be composed of a term that came into being much later than the term itself, much less a foreign term :-)
What’s more, when used alone, ‘xi’ 系 rarely, if not never, means ‘xitong’ 系统 (and vice versa, i.e., ‘xitong’ 系统 is seldom abbreviated as ‘xi’ 系 alone).
Rather, ‘xi’ 系 alone usually serves as the abbreviation for ‘xilie’ 系列 (or ’series’), as in Baoma Qi-xi (BMW 7 series), or that for ‘group’ or ‘family’, as in ‘zhongwen-xi’ 中文系(Chinese Language Department) ‘ladingyu-xi’ 拉丁语系(The Latin Language Family), and zhi-xi 直系 or pai-xi 派系.
FYI, I am a native speaker of Chinese (and I have double-checked my ideas above against Cihai etc). I hope I did not sound like I am saying I am smarter than you — I am simply a more experienced learner and user of the language :-)
But I can see you have certainly studied a lot of Chinese and have quite a knack for ‘lateral thinking’.
Cheers,
Shawn