[RCortex]

Simple questions:

1) How do you build guanxi?

2) How do you maintain guanxi?

3) How is guanxi lost after it's been gained?

4) Give me an example with two people where one has far more guanxi than another. How are they treated differently by the third party they have guanxi with? (No direct familial relation)

[girzel]

Guanxi is basically a kind of transactional friendship. You make guanxi the same way you make friends, by spending time with people, and going through things together. Some guanxi is built on real friendship (or on something like having gone to the same school together), in other cases it's pretty obvious to both parties that it's just a quid-pro-quo thing. In both cases, though, it sort of looks like a friendship from the outside.

Treating people to dinner and getting them drunk is a pretty common way of building guanxi. I've had people invite me to dinner and give me alcohol I don't want, hoping to then get something out of me later. The whole thing is terribly uncomfortable, largely because I simply don't like going to dinner with people I don't know well, and do not feel like I owe them anything afterwards (if anything, I'm annoyed that they've imposed on my time). Then they call up week or two later and say "hey, can you help me out with this thing", and then I have to decide what to do about that.

Like I said in my other comment, though, plenty of Chinese people don't like working this way either. My friends are real friends, and the people I usually work with are professionals, people who don't need to pretend that now we're blood brothers and we'll bend the rules to help each other. I've been in China for 15 years, and I've seen this kind of professionalism slowly supplanting the old system.

You lose guanxi by pissing off your "friends", or not returning favors. In my case, I can play the "I'm a weird foreigner and don't understand your rules" card, and I've only ever mildly annoyed a few people.

[zhemao]

Yes, a lot of Chinese, especially those who have lived in the West for a time, are uncomfortable with the social expectations inherent in guanxi. My parents usually refuse to accept gifts or invitations to dinner from other Chinese that they don't know very well because they know this will usually be followed by a request for some rather annoying favor later.

This also leads to somewhat amusing cultural disconnects. For instance, I was once interviewing a Chinese student for an officer position in the student club of which I was already an officer. (This is at a US university and I'm Chinese American) He came to the interview and gave me a bottle of 7-up.

[shostack]

What sorts of things would they ask for? Also, is there any good "socially acceptable" way to turn down dinners and unsolicited favors and such if one does not wish to become indebted, while still saving face and being polite?