| OP here. Although it is very often for me to call out Western-centric viewpoint on English forums, this time I tend to agree with people from Romania or other ex-communist countries :D. At least for me, it's more like a communist thing with Chinese flavor than a Chinese thing with communism flavor. Actually it is more complicated than it appears. As you can see, the whole urbanization process of China happens after communist took power. Many rules in the cities are new, and it's hard to say that the rules take places because of Chinese culture or because of communism, usually both. One thing that is certainly communism-related is that, because of planned economy and a very restricted market, some very basic things were on a shortage and you need "guanxi" for that. My mom recalls that 40 yrs ago ladies wanted to marry butchers (or the one who sells pork), just because they got more power due to the position they were on. You see Radu mentioned that people get extra half bread due to relations. My parents used to need ticket to buy rice and pork etc. That's where you need some "guanxi" to do basic things. Also, to go to hospitals one needs some "guanxi" because medical resources are limited (and price where controlled). Should it be a free market, private hospitals would be built and shortage would fall. TL;DR: Because communist countries government grab so much power in their hands, "guanxi" plays a more important role than it used to be. The importance of a relatively free market should never be underestimated. And Chinese people certainly needs a smaller government. Even today, the market is not as free as it could be and the government is still taking too much power (they made a lot of progress with that power though). It's a much bigger government than any democrats would imagine, bigger than a big government in American common sense! |
For example in Thailand I see Guanxi all the time, granted that it's firmly in the Chinese sphere-of-influence. But I bet if you go to some Central America Bureaucracy and you'll see the same thing.