Translated most often as ‘relationships’ or ‘connections,’ guanxi is a sacrosanct concept for Westerners interested in China – I’ve never found it to have much applicability. The other day I wandered into the Hubei Provincial Intellectual Property Rights Bureau and immediately set up several interviews. This has sort of become the modus operandi of research* – approach stranger and gather information (of potentially dubious quality, albeit).

This isn’t to say relationships and introductions aren’t important, but rather that we (as foreigners interested in China) place far too much emphasis on the exoticism of guanxi, a concept that would otherwise simply be called social capital. Within the China context sociologists seem to have caught on – but in the business community this type of exoticism is used as a shield – why bother learning the language and cultural norms when you’ve convinced yourself it’s necessary that you need an “in” to accomplish anything?

* Disclaimer: if I was doing anything more serious than random recorded interviews with low level officials, migrants, and business people, I might not be rely primarily on self-introductions. Social connections are obviously more important when institutional connections are not as strong – though in a way though this gives you more leeway to navigate on purely a social level without involving legal or authoritative channels. For example, it’s possible to wander into a construction site here and talk to people; in the U.S. one would need all sorts of liability releases to even set foot on the premises.  This isn’t to say that one system is necessarily better, but rather to point out that by making homogenous assumptions about things that seem to be different it’s possible to easily ignore the myriad aspects in which they are similar.