In addressing claims that the art of guanxi is declining in China's current incorporation of capitalism, this article argues that guanxi must be treated historically as a repertoire of cultural patterns and resources which are continuously transformed in their adaptation to, as well as shaping of, new social institutions and structures, and by the particular Chinese experience with globalization. The article takes issue with approaches which treat guanxi as a fixed essentialized phenomenon which can only wither away with the onslaught of new legal and commercial regimes. Rather, as the examples of Taiwan and post-socialist Russia's encounter with capitalism suggest, guanxi practice may decline in some social domains, but find new areas to flourish, such as business transactions, and display new social forms and expressions. This historical approach to guanxi, which is sensitive to issues of power both within the Chinese social order and between China and the West, is especially critical of the unreflective positivist methodology and the teleology of modernization theory/narrative and neo-liberal discourse embedded in the argument for the decline of guanxi.

The state apparatus in China today has taken upon itself almost total responsibility for administering the social and economic domain. The welfare and control of the population, the organization of production, planning all social activities, and the distribution of the means of subsistence have become primary concerns of organs of the state. The types of power relationships and their social and symbolic expressions, which have crystallized around the distribution and circulation of desirables in such a political economy, are the subject of the present study. The study will also examine how certain counter-techniques of power deviate from the larger strategy of power exercised through the state socialist political economy, forming pockets of intransigence from within.

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Mayfair Mei-hui Yang teaches in the anthropology and religious studies departments at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is working on a book manuscript titled “Re-Enchanting Modernity:Sovereignty, Popular Rituals, and Indigenous Civil Society in Coastal China.”

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