This book is about the social logic of how China works. The focus of analysis is on guanxi, the Chinese expression of personalized social relations. Personal and social relations are important in every culture and society because people live and work in the contexts of these relations. In Western countries, for example, it is common for people to have close personal relations while keeping social relations at a certain distance. In China, however, social relations may not matter much unless and until they are personalized to become part of a focal individual's guanxi network. You get a good job through your guanxi contacts. You start a new business with the money borrowed from and the business contract extended by your guanxi contacts. You manage an organization and sustain it through your guanxi networks of diverse ties. You are both ambitious and competent, and you are a big achiever in the job you do. But you may not get promoted to positions of higher rank or elected into prestigious societies of national honor without mobilizing your guanxi ties to help. Even filing a lawsuit or doing a legal job cannot be free of the underlying social logic of guanxi favoritism.

This book has grown out of my long interest in guanxi scholarship. Growing up in China, I lived in a guanxi culture. But this does not mean I automatically understood the nature of guanxi favoritism, or that I could uncover the internal and external logics of prevalent guanxi influence without adequate academic training. This training started with my reading of Fei Xiaotong's pre-1949 works when I was a college student in China in 1978–81. I gained a more systematic training in social network analysis (SNA) when I engaged in doctoral and postdoctoral research in the United States from 1985 to 1991. A SNA seminar with Nan Lin in my second year of doctoral study enlightened me, planting the scholarly seed of my research interest in guanxi as social exchange networks. Nan's teaching, his one-on-one coaching, his supervising of my dissertation, and his continuous mentoring during my postdoctoral career have been instrumental to my growth from a young student to a learned scholar about guanxi and social networks. This book is dedicated to Nan, my lifelong mentor.

A few other great scholars have each made a unique impact on my guanxi research. At Nankai University in 1981, Fei Xiaotong taught me and my classmates in a sociology class that marked the restoration of sociology to the Chinese college curriculum after its elimination in 1952. Fei's theory of the “mode of differential associations” gave me my first ever view of the centrality of guanxi in Chinese social structure. Andrew Walder, a senior colleague of mine when we both taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology during 1997–2001, showed me how to study China in sociological perspective; his concept of “instrumental particular ties” uncovered the theoretical nature of guanxi practices in Mao's and the post-Mao era. The works of Mayfair Yang and Yunxiang Yan, two influential social anthropologists on guanxi scholarship, have directed my attention to both the complex cultural meanings of guanxi and the resilience of guanxi norms in China under reform; I benefited from their comments on my work, and I enjoyed our personal conversations as well as scholarly exchanges at and outside of academic conferences. Finally, Ron Burt, a SNA authority, and Nancy DiTomaso, a well-known sociologist of racial stratification, have each made a remarkable contribution to my rethinking of guanxi. Ron's definition of guanxi as a network structure and his original research on “event contacts” are a showcase of how the study of guanxi networks can enrich the SNA knowledge system. Nancy has urged me to compare guanxi in China to social capital in the US, and her insistence that “these are essentially the same thing” has left a deep mark in my mind when conceptualizing guanxi and social capital. I've enjoyed and will continue to enjoy my collaboration with each of them.

Jonathan Skerrett at Polity Press has been a strong force and support behind this book. He approached me for this book project and waited, long before I was convinced and available to write it for Polity's China Today series. Like other books in the series, this one is intended as a small text for college and postgraduate courses on China. For me, this book is actually a half-and-half product: one half of the book is on my original research and the other half a summary of theoretical and empirical materials from other guanxi researchers. Given the limited space, I have chosen to discuss the prevalence and the increasing significance of guanxi favoritism in the social, economic, political, and legal spheres in China under reform, leaving other topics unattended to. I've made an effort to present quantitative materials in a way that can be understood and appreciated by readers without much quantitative training. A number of more detailed statistical tables can be found online at the book's webpage on www.politybooks.com/guanxi. I'm grateful for Jonathan's patience as well as for the useful comments of two anonymous reviewers he invited on my behalf to evaluate an earlier draft.

I'm grateful also for many collaborators and participants in the survey projects I've conducted since 1997, and a good deal of data from these projects is presented in this book. Deborah Davis and Shaoguang Wang were my collaborators on a 1997–2000 project, sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation, on urban consumers and material culture in Chinese cities; this project was the first opportunity to measure Chinese New Year visitor networks and social eating networks, which are discussed in chapter 2. The main participants in this project included Wang Hui (who passed away in 2017 at the age of 87) and Guan Ying in Tianjin, Lu Hanlong and Li Yu in Shanghai, Liu Xin and Wang Tie in Wuhan, and Song Ding, Xu Daowen, and Yi Songguo in Shenzhen. A grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (HKUST6052/98H) funded my first Job-Search Network (JSNET) survey project in 1998–9, and a number of grants from China (11AZD022, 13&ZD177) financed subsequent data collections of the JSNET project in 2009, 2014, and 2016. The JSNET project is heavily used in this book, especially in chapter 3; the key collaborators in the project were Liu Shaojie and Wang Wenbin in Changchun, Zhang Wenhong in Tianjin and Shanghai, Bai Hongguang, Guan Xinping, and Mi Shu in Tianjin, Lin Juren and Wu Yuxiao in Jinan, Li Yu in Shanghai, Qiu Haixiong and Liang Yucheng in Guangzhou, Hu Rong and Gong Wenjuan in Xiamen, Feng Shiping and Li Huai in Lanzhou, and Li Liming, Yang Jianke, Zhang Shun, and Zhao Wenlong in Xi’an. My formal and current doctoral advisees Cheng Cheng, Guo Xiaoxian, Hao Mingsong, Huang Xianbi, Li Yinghui, Lu Qiang, Quan Xiaojuan, Sun Yu, Xiao Yang, Yang Yang, and Zhang Lei prepared datasets and many statistical tables and figures presented in this book and on the webpage, and Zhang Yixue provided technical assistance with the bibliography.

My special thanks are due to my wife Qinghong for her love and companionship. As always, she is the first listener to my “presentation” of ideas in rough form at home. Her reactions are as important as her personal reflections on Chinese life. I'm also grateful to my sons Peter and John, as well as their significant others Linda and Kayoko, respectively, for their emotional support. To them, Dad is always working and not making much time for the family. After this book, is a change expected? They may still wonder.

I thank Polity Press editors for their professional assistance. Jonathan Skerrett, once again, worked with me on my first drafts, offering highly useful comments on the narratives of each chapter as well as specific suggestions on the presentation of quantitative materials. Fiona Sewell provided thorough and diligent copyediting, and her effort has improved the exposition of this book. And others at Polity Press have been a source of advice and help at various stages of this book's production.

The main contents of this book were written and revised while I was taking my sabbatical leave from the University of Minnesota and residing at Xi’an Jiaotong University during the academic year of 2017–18. I'm grateful to both institutions for their support in many different ways.