Although hardly known to non-native speakers before the 1980s, the Chinese term guanxi 关系 has quickly gained currency in the English language in recent decades. Guanxi has been well documented as an essential part of all human-related activities in China, including personal matters, business transactions and politics. Yet, despite various discussions in the mass media and in-depth analysis in academic research, there is still much to be gained from further exploration of guanxi in its multifaceted forms and its various roles. This paper investigates the role of tunqin 屯亲, a special form of rural guanxi, in building rural resilience, and examines the impact of its maintenance with the exchange of cash gifts.
The research for this paper was carried out as part of a larger project on income and expenditure in rural Heilongjiang. The analysis presented here is based on six months of fieldwork conducted in Qinggang 青冈 county, Heilongjiang province, between late 2006 and mid-2007. In addition to government documents and published data, this study draws on evidence gathered from on-site observations and unstructured interviews with villagers, cadres and low-level officials. Interviews were conducted in private houses and local offices to ensure that interviewees were in their everyday surroundings and to demonstrate rural guanxi and its impact on individuals in the real world.Footnote 1
This paper proceeds as follows. It begins by reviewing the existing literature on guanxi, and then goes on to describe the poverty of the field site, setting out the background for the study. The third section contextualizes tunqin, a special type of guanxi in Qinggang, with an illustration of a rural household. This is then followed by a discussion of tunqin and its role in rural China. The fifth section examines the maintenance of guanxi and how this impacts on rural life. The paper then goes on to discuss the role of tunqin guanxi and its maintenance in building resilience in a poverty-stricken rural area before it concludes.
Revisiting Guanxi
As a term in the Chinese context, guanxi has been extensively elaborated on in academic studies both within China and overseas. Yet, even the most comprehensive definition is unable to capture all its multifaceted dimensions. Literally meaning relation or relationship, guanxi is closely related to social capital,Footnote 2 and in studies exploring social capital in China, guanxi is often depicted as its Chinese variant.Footnote 3 It has been described as “a form of social network that defines one's place in the social structure and provides security, trust and a prescribed role,”Footnote 4 and also as a “mechanism by which individuals are able to achieve personal, family or business objectives through the formation of instrumental associations with appropriately positioned others.”Footnote 5 Without a universally accepted definition, however, guanxi is usually understood by the simple term, “social connections.”
Two perspectives of guanxi
Scholarly accounts of guanxi generally emphasize two perspectives: institutional and instrumental.Footnote 6 Such distinctions have often been identified as preordained versus achieved relations,Footnote 7 where the former is characterized by the type of expressions and affections to be found, for example, in families and kinships, and the latter is featured with motivations and objectives mostly seen in business and work relationships, described as expressive and instrumental ties.Footnote 8
In general, studies that look at the institutional dimension and the instrumental value of guanxi separately tend to relate to the specific rural/urban settings under examination.Footnote 9 For example, urban guanxi has been identified as being more utilitarian,Footnote 10 whereas rural guanxi is, as argued by Andrew Kipnis, connected more to community bonds based on kinship and renqing 人情 (human emotions).Footnote 11 These contrasts between rural and urban guanxi have divided perceptions so that the former is seen as more feminine and the latter as more masculine.Footnote 12 However, Yan Yunxiang argues that the binary opposition of emotional and instrumental dimensions of interpersonal relations is better understood as primary and extended guanxi. Footnote 13 He proposes that primary guanxi stems from the self-core. Further from the self-centre, the moral or renqing dimension of guanxi extends and changes into more instrumental ties and becomes extended guanxi.
Urban guanxi
Most studies of the past few decades have focused on urban guanxi and how it is instrumental to advancing economic benefit. There has been much discussion of how guanxi can be used to acquire power, status and resources in China,Footnote 14 and of the well-known “back door” strategies.Footnote 15 Drawing from much of the analysis of urban guanxi, it is argued that the current form of Chinese guanxi is, to a certain extent, a product of the planned economy era when, owing to very limited resources, people had to resort to guanxi for whatever they needed.Footnote 16 In this context, guanxi can be seen as an informal institution which substitutes for the market economy.Footnote 17
The discussion of guanxi operating in the absence of market rules fits in with research on social networks and reciprocity in economics and political science against the background of economic growth that examines the relationship between institutional change and socio-economic development.Footnote 18 As market mechanisms are developed, informal institutions will gradually diminish and will eventually be replaced by formal ones built on market rules.Footnote 19 In studies of Chinese society, similar views are expressed: where the state has established market mechanisms, there is a decline in guanxi practices.Footnote 20 Some scholars, however, maintain that guanxi is resilient and will not easily fade away unless the market operations depending on supply and demand are fully established, and Chinese society is transformed from a relation-based system into a rule-based one.Footnote 21 During the transition period, guanxi practices have come in for criticism as they fuel the country's rampant corruption and are seen to be an impediment to China's development towards a modern society based on the rule of law and market mechanisms.Footnote 22
Rural guanxi
There has been less attention given to the role of guanxi in the rural context in the post-Mao period.Footnote 23 Yan Yunxiang's study of guanxi in a village in Heilongjiang province describes how guanxi perpetuated by gift exchanges has strengthened the local community and enhanced moral obligations.Footnote 24 Andrew Kipnis has studied the diversity of rural guanxi in a wide range of gift-giving practices and finds a correlation between material exchange and the closeness of guanxi. Footnote 25
Similar to urban guanxi that is “carefully initiated, preserved and renewed through the giving and receiving of gifts, favours and dinners or banquets,” gift giving based on reciprocity also provides a central rule for rural guanxi. Footnote 26 A gift creates an outstanding obligation which is expected to be fulfilled. Favours have to be remembered and returned, although not always instantly. This concept of reciprocity is well documented in Yan's work in which he describes how villagers carefully maintained their guanxi by keeping a list of their gift-exchange activities.Footnote 27 As described by Fei Xiaotong, this concept of reciprocity can be dated back to a much earlier time in rural China. Before 1949, reciprocation was accepted as a tool with which to maintain connections among people in rural communities.Footnote 28 If one person owes another person a favour (renqing), an opportunity would be found to repay that favour with a bigger favour, so that the person owed the favour in the first place is now indebted to the person who owed him. This is a renqing investment. Yan also noticed that in rural Heilongjiang return gifts had to be more valuable. Apart from the inflation factor for the time elapsed since the favour was granted, villagers have to keep in mind the ever ongoing renqing.Footnote 29 In this way, exchanges based on reciprocity escalate as guanxi grows tighter, and more material goods and resources are needed to support a closer guanxi.
Owing to the complexity of rural China, and especially because of its rapid development in the reform years, further research is required into the diversified roles of guanxi in rural communities in order to understand better whether it is more instrumental as manipulated by urbanites, or if it reflects more emotional content, as argued by Kipnis.Footnote 30 In reality, the instrumental and affective roles of guanxi cannot be mutually exclusive, and the dichotomy might have been much corroded in the development of the complex rural society. Therefore, the authors of this paper believe that rural guanxi must be studied in its specific context to understand the mixture of its instrumental and affective aspects. In fact, it is a specific social and economic background that shapes guanxi in its specific form. Yet, the role of guanxi in relation to its context is still an under-researched issue and deserves further examination. This paper intends to remedy this by providing in-depth analysis.
The current study is not a longitudinal study, nor does it attempt to provide a full picture of rural guanxi during economic transition. However, it contributes towards a fuller understanding of such a continuous change, and especially how tunqin guanxi is developed and functions in a poverty-stricken county.
The Field Site, Qinggang County
Administratively, Qinggang falls under the jurisdiction of Suihua 绥化 prefecture in west-central Heilongjiang province. Located in the hinterland of the fertile Songnen plain 松嫩平原, Qinggang is one of the province's grain-producing counties. It covers an area of 2,685 km2 and has a population of around half a million, 72.9 per cent of which is rural. Since 2001, it has consisted of four district communities, 15 towns and townships, and 165 villages.
Local poverty
At first glance an ordinary county in north China, Qinggang is unique for two reasons: poverty and corruption. It was designated as a “national poor county” under the state's Poor Area Development Programme for poverty reduction. In 1994, 592 counties were identified as “national poor counties” when the state decided that counties with a per capita rural income of less than 400 yuan in 1992 should be designated as poverty-stricken.Footnote 31 Qinggang was included among the 592 counties as its per capita rural income in 1992 was 299 yuan, well below the 400 yuan national threshold.
Once an area has been designated as a “national poor county,” it is entitled to funds from the state in three forms: special loans for poverty reduction; work for poverty relief (yigong daizhen 以工代赈), which provides work opportunities building local infrastructure instead of providing poverty relief funds; and capital investment for local development. In order to qualify for state funding, some counties in Heilongjiang competed with each other for the “national poor” title.Footnote 32 Once given the “national poor” designation, therefore, it would be unwise to have the title removed. However, this is what happened to Qinggang in 2001 when a substantial increase in per capita income was reported – from 751 yuan in 1993 to 2,300 yuan in 1998 – a very high rural income which was not actually realized until after 2008.
In fact, rural income remained low in Qinggang, despite the county's close geographical proximity to the two richest cities in Heilongjiang, Harbin and Daqing 大庆.Footnote 33 Qinggang lies 120 kilometres to the north of the provincial capital Harbin and 90 kilometres east of Daqing. However, location has not helped Qinggang raise its rural income. For years, rural income in Qinggang had been around half of the provincial average and the situation did not appear to improve in 2007, when field research for this article was carried out (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Rural per capita Income in Qinggang, Heilongjiang, and China
Local corruption
In addition to poverty, Qinggang is also known for an infamous court case in 2005, the biggest bribery scandal concerning the selling of positions in Communist China at that time. Ma De 马德, the former committee secretary of Suihua municipality, was convicted of receiving substantial sums of money in bribes (over 6 million yuan) from officials at the municipal level and lower levels of government in exchange for appointing them to higher positions. A total of 265 officials were involved, including the former head of the Ministry of Land and Resources, who was previously president of Heilongjiang Provincial Political Consultative Conference. Two officials from Qinggang were also involved. One of them had bribed Ma with 500,000 yuan in order to be appointed county governor.
This case brought Qinggang notoriety and people were curious about why the position of county governor would be worth so much money. Inevitably, they wondered how much money a county governor would be able to make in such a poverty-stricken place where 40 per cent of the rural population still lived below the national poverty line and the average per capita income was less than 2,000 yuan in 2005.Footnote 34
For the current study, the case of Qingang is worth researching not only for its poor economic development but also for its special political background. This has provided a particular rural context in which villagers have developed poverty-coping strategies along with a specific form of local guanxi.
Contextualizing Rural Guanxi
The Guan family provides a good illustration of the role rural guanxi plays in Qinggang. The Guans are an ordinary rural family with four members in Z Township of Qinggang. They should have been able to manage their 6.6 mu 亩 of farmland and gain extra income by doing some casual off-farm work during the slack season, just like any other rural household.Footnote 35 However, their lives changed in 1996 when Guan lost his right leg in a hit-and-run traffic accident. Medical treatment following the accident immediately landed the family with debts as, at that time, there was no medical insurance for farmers and all medical expenses had to be self-funded. Over the next ten years, Guan and his wife worked hard to pay off their debts, but this work destroyed their health. Guan had liver disease and his wife suffered from various illnesses but she was never formally diagnosed because she could not afford to see a doctor in a hospital. Just when their debts were almost paid off, their 14-year-old youngest daughter was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2006. This diagnosis came before the new rural cooperative medical service was introduced to Qinggang, and again, they had to fund the treatment themselves. The medical treatment in the initial 70 days cost 80,000 yuan. Further treatments were expected to continue for the next six years at a cost of 16,000 yuan per year. This was an astronomical sum of money for an ordinary rural family whose income came mainly from the 6.6 mu of land they farmed for maize production.
Guan's efforts to survive
Guan once asked for help from the local government, kneeling in front of the township governor, but to no avail.Footnote 36 He was told to return and ask the brigade (village) secretary to take him door-to-door fundraising.Footnote 37 However, the village secretary refused to help, telling Guan that, “there are so many families with difficulties. Once I raise funds for you, there are others who are ill. Who shall I help?”
Having failed to secure any financial assistance from the township government, Guan and his wife raised funds by renting out their contracted land which they had just planted with crops.Footnote 38 They also tried to sell their house, but no one would buy it, even for the low price of 2,000–3,000 yuan in total. After exhausting all financial avenues, they finally obtained help in the form of a 7,000 yuan grant from the county government. The money came in two stages, the first payment was for 4,000 yuan and the second 3,000 yuan. Guan went to the civil affairs office in the county government where he was told that the government would be able to offer him some help and that the local civil affairs officer in his home township would send the money to his home. When the local officer arrived with the money, he asked Guan to give him 500 yuan saying that, as civil affairs assistant, he had expended a lot of effort on Guan's behalf, indicating that he had used his guanxi with the upper-level government to get the money for Guan. Guan replied, “you cannot take the money! This money is to save my child's life!” But the local officer would not leave, and said to Guan, “you give me the money this time and, in the future, if there is anything good, I won't forget you.” Considering that he was the local officer and that the family would have to ask for his assistance again, Guan reluctantly gave him 500 yuan. When the second payment of 3,000 yuan was issued, the officer took another 500 yuan, only this time he did not even ask Guan's permission.Footnote 39
The financial assistance from the government did not fully cover the Guans' expenses, and so they resorted to taking out a high-interest loan of 20,000 yuan from loan sharks. They had been turned down in their application for a loan from the local rural credit cooperatives because they were considered to “have no capability to repay.”Footnote 40 The interest rate of the private loan was said to be 30 per cent, and interest each year was as high as 6,000 yuan, which was more than the income they made from their land.
Help from local guanxi
In the case of the Guans, it appears that the government and its formal institutions in this poverty-stricken county failed to offer adequate support, and their situation was made worse by local corruption. In the end, it was Guan's fellow villagers, through the local guanxi network, who offered various forms of assistance to help the family in their hour of need.
Cash contributions
On hearing that Guan's daughter needed money urgently for treatment, villagers gathered round the Guans and contributed as much as they could. According to local residents, the Guans were such nice friendly people that all those living in the tun went to Guan's house and offered help. The villagers were generous in their contributions and the money proved to be life-saving as the girl survived the emergency treatment.
It seems that the Guans asked for financial help several times afterwards. During the field research, when Guan took the first author to one villager's house and told the hostess the purpose of the visit, the woman smiled with relief and said frankly, “I thought you had come again for money!” Although the villagers were not rich people and could not keep donating cash, they never stopped helping in other ways.
Food treats
The Guans was living extremely frugally. Apart from a sack of flour provided by the government, the only food grain that could be found inside the house was maize. When staying in their home for dinner, the first author was treated with pancakes, corn porridge and runner beans (grown in their backyard), the best food they could prepare. Villagers said there was usually only staple food for the family. In addition to the runner beans, their only vegetables were leeks and cucumbers grown in the backyard in summer. They spent every penny they had on medical treatment for their daughter, but could not afford anything nutritious for her. Their daughter was much loved and pitied by their fellow villagers, who often took her to their homes for delicious food at dinner times. This, according to the villagers, was one of the ways they could continue helping the family.
Employment assistance
As the Guans were deeply in debt, their eldest daughter was soon forced to drop out of school. She became the youngest migrant worker from the village and began working in a location far from her home. Similar to findings from other studies, most of the migrant workers from Z Township were making a living either as factory or construction workers, or else in the service industry in the cities. Young males worked in factories making sofas or jewellery boxes, and some worked on construction sites. Those with special skills would work as chefs. Young girls usually ended up in hotels and restaurants working as waitresses. However, Guan's eldest daughter was only 15 and was unable to apply for formal employment. By going through the local guanxi network, she managed to gain an introduction to and secure work in a clothes factory in a small city. She worked in the factory every day from 6 am to 12 pm for 300 yuan per month, with food and accommodation provided. It was expected that this help would alleviate the family's financial burdens.
Household help
The Guans' house was in a very poor condition. However, the walls and ceiling were covered in white paper and plastic sheets when the fieldtrip was conducted. These improvements came via their local guanxi. According to one local woman:
The family's condition is like this. You came this year, the house looks better. There are some plastic sheets covering the ceiling, given by this or that one in the tun during the past spring festival. If you came last year, without those plastic sheets, I doubt if you could come in being such a tidy young lady. It seems the house is going to collapse because of the big cracks and is leaking. The open windows couldn't be closed. And the doors! Who would buy such a house? Last year, they said they would sell the house at whatever price, as long as someone would like to take it. Even for only two or three thousand [yuan], we would save our child. Who would take it? No one! You see how pitiful they are.Footnote 41
Owing to Guan's physical disability, local people often helped his family by doing farm work and other household chores. Such help was also offered to others in the community when they were in need, especially women and the elderly whose husbands and children had migrated for work. In general, the various forms of mutual assistance among the villagers in the poverty-stricken community has effectively helped people like the Guans to overcome household hardships.
Conceptualizing Tunqin Guanxi
In reality, local people use the term tunqin to refer to their fellow villagers and for those within their guanxi circles.
The definition of tunqin
According to Yan, the word tun is a local term for village, and qin means kin, so that tunqin literally means relatives living in the same tun.Footnote 42 Currently, tunqin mostly appears in literary works and newspaper reports, and there has been little academic research done on this type of guanxi in rural China. Of the few studies where tunqin is mentioned briefly, most have cited Yan's work,Footnote 43 believing tunqin to mean fellow villagers who are “co-living relatives,”Footnote 44 or “relatives of coresidence.”Footnote 45 In other words, it is believed that the term refers to people living in the same area who consider themselves as belonging to the same family, regardless of whether there is a consanguineous connection or not.Footnote 46
In this article, however, we argue that, according to the above definitions, Yan's explanation of tun is inaccurate in that unlike villages with certain administrative functions, a tun is formed naturally so that a village and a tun might not share the same boundary. For example, in Guan's township there were 17 villages including 58 tuns, indicating that a tun is on average much smaller than a village. Such a spatial difference has physically encouraged people in a tun to set up a closer relationship than fellow villagers.
Tunqin as a unique rural fictive kin relationship
Observations from our field research confirms that tunqin guanxi refers to a connection that is more than the connection between fellow villagers. Guan would address everyone he met from the village as if they were relatives, for example greeting them as auntie or brother-in-law. And, despite only being in his mid-thirties and having two teenage daughters, he was called “grandpa” (laoye 姥爷) by some young children. He later explained that was because they were tunqin. He had referred to people in this way since he was young, and for generations villagers had automatically established a “quasi-relative/kin” relationship. It appeared complicated, but people there knew exactly what their corresponding positions were in the network.
Our observation and interview data have shown that some villagers in Z Township had established a close network based on tunqin. As well as addressing each other as if they were family, villagers also visited each other whenever they liked and felt at home at whichever household they visited. For example, it was not unusual to find a visitor sitting on the bed cross-legged, smoking and relaxing as if he or she were the owner of the house. And if when cooking a mother was short of a leek, she would simply tell her daughter, “pick up some from your auntie's backyard!” Of course, the auntie in this case is not a consanguineous relative but a tunqin.
The practice of addressing others as if they were relatives without the connection of consanguinity has been noticed by Kipnis in Fengjia 冯家.Footnote 47 Kipnis compares this to Fei's findings that kinship terms are extended in the village regardless of surname to show one's psychological attitude and level of respect towards the other.Footnote 48 This fictional kinship has been described by Fei as being the result of guofang 过房 (pseudo-adoption), similar to the baiganxin 拜干亲 (fictive kin making) documented by Yan.Footnote 49
We, however, have found tunqin to be different from pseudo-adopted and fictive kinships in that either guofang or baiganqin usually involves a ritual act, yet no such custom is found to be associated with the setting up of tunqin guanxi. Besides, according to Yan, tunqin is “created through individual cultivation rather than the preexisting membership for anyone born into the community.”Footnote 50 This also differs from the current study because Guan's tunqin guanxi was created by his forebears through their individual efforts and passed on down to him and his children. Such guanxi is inherited from one generation to the next and is a preordained relationship for descendants.
Tunqin as a flexible type of rural guanxi
Yan once translated tunqin as “intimate fellow villagers,” but found that part of the original meaning concerning the similarity between co-residence and kinship ties was lost in the translation, indicating the importance of the link between location and intimacy regarding the term tunqin.Footnote 51
So far, all of the above definitions of tunqin have shown that the term is location specific.Footnote 52 However, regionalism only explains tun, the location, but it is not enough to form “qin,” the intimate or close relationships. Evidently, when outsiders settle in a rural community, they are not accepted automatically or invited by the indigenous villagers to become part of their “qin” or kin. Very often, there are conflicts between settlers and the original villagers.Footnote 53 This is because a settler's kinsfolk are back in his home village where his ancestors lived. As argued by Fei, regionalism is inseparable from consanguinity.Footnote 54 Take household registration as an example. One's original home place, known as zuji 祖籍 (ancestors' hometown), is still recorded in the registration booklet. However, in reality, one's father or even grandfather may never have even set foot in this zuji, which is inherited from one's ancestors. This phenomenon leads Fei to comment that regionalism is “the projection of consanguinity into space.”Footnote 55
By the same token, in Qinggang, geographical location alone is not sufficient for the establishment of a tunqin relationship. Qinggang's history can be traced back 150 years. It was a hunting area for the royal family during the Qing dynasty and was mostly uninhabited except for the occasional visiting nomads. Land reclamation started in 1851 when a total of 230 households of Man nationality (manzu 满族) were relocated to settle along the Tongken River 通肯河 (near Z Township today), and six guantun 官屯 (official tuns) were set up.Footnote 56 Guan, as a Man ethnic minority, might be one of the original settlers' descendants. Over generations, lineage groups have gradually developed in the local areas. As the region developed, more migrants arrived and formed geographical relationships with the local people. As the communities have grown, through working and living together, and most likely through marriage, the mutual penetration and interaction of consanguinity and geographical ties have combined to form tunqin.
For Fei Xiaotong, consanguinity is the foundation of an identity society while regionalism forms the basis for a contract society.Footnote 57 In a society built on the former, guanxi is based on human feelings (renqing), whereas in a society linked by the latter guanxi is based on contracts. Therefore, according to Fei, it is impossible for businesses to exist in a society built on consanguinity. However, non-natives or new settlers residing in the same place are different. As marginalized residents in the consanguineous communities, newcomers are able to disregard renqing and thus become more confident and flexible when transacting business. Fei explains how in this way people in rural Yunnan would discourage their close relatives from joining the same cong 賩, the local “money club,” but would invite their friends to become members.Footnote 58 In analysing conflicts between rural relatives, Yan also observes that, “without the money, relatives should have been able to keep very good relationships.”Footnote 59
As a combination of both consanguinity and geographical ties, tunqin may be maintained through renqing guanxi as close as in consanguineous relationships, and it might also solve problems like new settlers with purely geographical ties. If needed, tunqin might be based more on personal intimacy and less on rules, or vice versa. Therefore, compared with blood and geographical ties, tunqin is more flexible. With the exact location unfixed, tunqin is located between the instrumentalism of urban guanxi and the emotional content of rural guanxi, thus it plays a comparatively competent role in rural Chinese society owing to its elasticity.
Tunqin as a coping strategy against rural poverty
The question remains of what status tunqin carries in a certain rural community. Previous studies that refer to tunqin suggest that it is not a close relationship in rural China. For example, Liao Wenbi finds tunqin to be just above the basic line of gift exchange, and Yan Yunxiang has also ranked it below voluntarily constructed friendship and fictive kinship.Footnote 60 However, we found tunqin to be a far more intimate relationship than has been described by others. Why?
Existing literature appears to indicate that the status of tunqin in a rural community is associated with what coping strategies villagers have available to them. For example, in Hubei, where lineage dominates the very traditional rural society, tunqin is simply a term similar in meaning to friendship.Footnote 61 Yan found that in the village of Xiajia 下岬 in Heilongjiang where villagers have better economic opportunities, the tunqin relationship is not as close as that of good friends or of fictive kinsmen.Footnote 62
Based on our observations in Qinggang, we argue that where there is a low level of economic development, ineffective government assistance and pervasive official corruption, villagers tend to turn to informal institutions such as guanxi as one of the few remaining coping strategies available to them in times of need. In this context, guanxi in its tunqin form has become more prominent and important in rural life.
Maintaining Rural Guanxi
Similar to other geographic areas examined in the existing literature, gift-giving activities in Qinggang are extremely important in maintaining rural guanxi.
Obligatory cash gifts
When explaining why they had to give cash gifts, villagers claimed it was because they were in renqing debt, most probably because they had received money as gifts from others on previous occasions. Renqing has a literal meaning of human emotions. It is a kind of sociable emotion between people which needs to be nurtured and strengthened through social exchanges. The closer the renqing, the more expensive the gift. Higher value gifts also further enhance existing renqing. The exchange of gifts driven by renqing requirements creates more intimate guanxi, which in turn encourages more exchange activities to foster more renqing. The whole process is realized through gift exchanges based on the traditional Confucius ethical code of lishangwanglai 礼尚往来, or etiquette demands reciprocity. As one villager explained, “isn't there a saying of lishangwanglai? They give us 500 [yuan] for my son's wedding, I cannot give back 400.”
Interestingly, there were times when the villagers were invited to an occasion even though they had no special relationship with the host, as one villager, Li, explained:
The other day, I … met Chen xx, Chen xx asked me to have a drink [for a family occasion]. You see, we are not relatives, so I cannot say we are friends, just acquaintances from the same tun, and the same brigade. He told me to have a drink, and I said OK, OK.Footnote 63
To accept such an “invitation,” Li had to pay at least 50 yuan to Chen, according to the usual practice, in order to show that he was giving a reasonable gift. From his conversation with Chen, it is clear that Li attended the “drink” because he and Chen were both in the same tun and therefore he had no choice but to attend. Otherwise, he would be considered by others as eccentric and lose face.
Increasing the cash gifts
Over the years, the practice of giving gifts has undergone great changes along with the economic and cultural development in rural China. For example, in earlier years, people gave presents rather than cash. In an interview, a former village Party secretary gave an example of gift-giving many years ago when one of the villagers was about to marry. As village secretary, he collected 47 yuan from 47 households and bought a clock for 49.5 yuan for the couple (he contributed the extra 2.5 yuan himself). However, the days when it was acceptable to give a thing as a gift in Heilongjiang are long gone. Nowadays, it is only acceptable to give cash; instead of gifting actual goods, the value of the goods has been converted into cash, similar to the concept of ganzhe 干折.Footnote 64
Over the years, the value of cash gifts has kept increasing. In the 1930s, gift-giving expenses for ceremonial occasions in rural China accounted for one-thirtieth to one-fortieth of the total income of each household;Footnote 65 in the 1990s, such expenses were as high as one-fifth of a villager's annual income, and were found to be regressive in that less well-off families tended to spend more proportionally than rich rural families.Footnote 66 In Qinggang, the amount expended on these giving activities each year was also high compared with the local rural income of several thousand yuan on average for an individual household. As shown in the above example, at least 50 yuan had to be given for normal guanxi, and up to 200 or 300 yuan would be given for occasions involving close relationships, such as a relative's wedding. Clearly, this level of gift-giving has become a tremendous burden for many families.
The impact of giving cash gifts
What remains unchanged is the large number of occasions which require gifts. In rural Heilongjiang, the numerous money-giving occasions mostly involve a feast. The above example of Chen's drink is a typical one. By attending the feast, a closer relationship is formed between the host and the guest. However, the impact of giving cash gifts has been great on rural households. There are reports that giving money for big occasions has become an unavoidable and increasingly onerous obligation for Chinese farmers.Footnote 67 In some extreme cases, some villagers think up ways to recoup the money. For example, a story circulated in the local area that one farmer was so angry about having to give so much money in gifts that he invited his fellow villagers for a feast to celebrate his newly built henhouse! According to a retired village secretary:
This [giving of cash gifts] is really … you say, is it a custom or problem? I am not sure. It has been handed down from our ancestors. What is the point? You just can't win! You see, it is supposed to be voluntary … but something like: hi Old Zhang, Old Wang, my child is getting married and I would like to invite you for a drink [to the wedding feast]. He is not actually saying he is asking for money [so it is hard for people to refuse]! … Ordinary people would say that's the most important moment of my family, and I just invite you for a drink … you see this … there is no solution!Footnote 68
During interviews and informal conversations, villagers would complain about giving cash gifts whenever their expenditure was mentioned. They considered such money giving to be obligatory, while their role in the process was passive. One woman further commented, “It would be great if we could spend the money – several thousand kuai 块 – on our own family!” But she also indicated that it was a tradition and custom that nobody was able to change.
No matter how pointless and wasteful in nature the villagers found the exchange of cash gifts to be, or how reluctant they were to partake in the process, the giving of cash gifts plays a vital role in the maintenance of the local guanxi. However, even though what is given is expected to be returned based on the reciprocity of gift exchange, it does impose a great financial burden on villagers. Taking the rural community as a whole, over the years more and more resources have been put into the exchange of cash gifts, much of which have been spent on the provision of food and drink on the special occasions.
Discussion
This article has discussed how rural guanxi, and in particular tunqin guanxi, builds resilience in a poverty-stricken county in north China, and how the maintenance of rural guanxi, in the form of reciprocal gift and money exchanges, impacts on rural life.
Tunqin is a special type of rural guanxi found in Qinggang. Its uniqueness lies not only in the way it is built up and cultivated by individuals in the form of kin relationships that are consolidated through the generations, but also in its elasticity in that it comprises both instrumental and institutional elements that are found in urban and traditional rural guanxi. It can be argued that tunqin has become an effective and successful form of guanxi that works within and for the rural community. Currently, rural China is undergoing a transitional stage in that traditional institutions have been undermined by the communist regime while new ones are still under construction.Footnote 69 This is reflected in the evidence from Qinggang: villagers gained little benefit from the stagnating local economy, and market rules and necessary formal institutions were far from well established. This, accompanied with local corruption, deprived villagers of their fair share of and access to resources so that people had to resort to tunqin, the quasi-kinship, to get what they needed. Therefore, it is the scarcity of available resources and unavailability of coping mechanisms that make the role of guanxi more prominent.Footnote 70 When economic development is slow, with undeveloped formal institutions and insufficient government support, guanxi is one of the few coping strategies available to those in urgent need of help.
However, the maintenance of local guanxi among villagers is costly. Reciprocity might ensure that what is given out is returned eventually, yet it does impose a great financial burden on villagers in the present. Over the years, taking the rural community as a whole, more resources have been invested in cash gifts, leaving the villagers more impoverished and with fewer resources of their own.
To summarize, we argue that rural guanxi provides contingent support for villagers and cushions them against unexpected financial upheavals when formal institutions are not accessible. However, maintaining local guanxi through the exchange of cash gifts further diminishes rural income in such a poverty-stricken region. The maintenance of guanxi in order to ensure help at some future point in time has thus become the ultimate and maybe unexpected result of villagers being deprived of chances for development and even for survival. However, by maintaining guanxi, villagers are diminishing what few resources they have and this ultimately undermines rural resilience. As argued by some Chinese scholars, villagers nowadays are trapped in a vicious circle of cash-gift giving.Footnote 71
This research is based on what was observed in Qinggang at a certain point of time in a changing rural community. As noted by Kipnis, rural guanxi-based gift giving has been anything but static since 1949.Footnote 72 It is expected that in the future, when development brings prosperity to the region, the rural guanxi in Qinggang will almost certainly display a different profile, as resources and their availability are among other factors that will reshape the development of future guanxi.
Biographical notes
Yan Gao joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2012 after obtaining her PhD in land economy from the University of Cambridge. She is currently working as a lecturer. Her main research interests focus on social networks, institutional reform and collective ownership in rural China.
Shailaja Fennell is at the Centre for Development Studies and department of land economy at the University of Cambridge where she has been teaching since 1996. Her current research interests include rural development and institutional reform, gender and household dynamics, kinship and ethnicity and their implications for collective action, and the provision of public goods through innovative partnerships.
