Review: [untitled] Author(s): Yanjie Bian Reviewed work(s): Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China by Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang Source: The China Quarterly, No. 142 (Jun., 1995), pp. 593-594 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the School of Oriental and African Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/655436 Accessed: 08/06/2009 10:03 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Book Reviews Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. By MAYFAIRMEI-HUIYANG. [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1994. 370 pp. Hard cover ?35.50, ISBN 0-8014-9592-X; paperback $15.50, ISBN 0-8014-2343-0.] Students of contemporary China have known for decades the importance of guanxi in understandingChinese life. Few, however, have examined it as comprehensively as has Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang in this book, the results ~of more than ten years of outstanding ethnographic research in China. An important contribution of the book is Yang's close inquiry into the nature of guanxi at a time of drastic change. Although literately it means relationship, Yang correctly points out that in China's "gift economy" its essence is the exchange of use-values. Thus, "friendship, kinship, classmates, and so forth are not coextensive with guanxi, but serve as bases or potential sites for guanxi practice" (p. 111). This practice is termed guanxixue, and involves "the exchange of gifts, favors, and banquets; the cultivation of personal relationships and networks of mutual dependence; and the manufacturing of obligation and indebtedness" (p. 6). What informs these practices and their native descriptions, argues Yang, "is the conception of the primacy and binding power of personal relationships and their importance in meeting the needs and desires of everyday life" (p. 6). This central theme guides the descriptions and analyses throughout the book. Guanxixue takes on an individual level, since, obviously, it is people who cultivate guanxi to meet their needs and desires. But this distinction of the Chinese personality is not without cultural roots: according to Yang, the Confucian tradition of defining individuals in terms of face, obligation, loyalty and favours has bound the Chinese in a web of social relationships on a personal level. She shows in her vivid interviews and observations that strict bureaucraticrules after 1949 signified guanxi as a symbolic capital (as opposed to a political and office capital) used to obtain and reallocate hierarchically distributed resources (such as jobs, housing, medicines, train tickets). The government bureaucracy and the work unit system, though created to function for the party-state,provided as many links as kinship and friendship for people to cultivate guanxi for their instrumental purposes. When markets finally emerged and grew in the late 1980s and early 1990s, guanxi practices were used for exchanging "exchange-values" such as money and loans. Guanxi now takes a form of "rhizomatic networks" that play a growing role in private sector activities and emergent associations, and in so doing link the individual to society and to formal groups. In Yang's view, guanxi is creating a new minjian for China, similar to, but with clear distinctions from, Eastern Europe's civil society. Written in the anthropological traditions of Bourdieu, de Certeau, Foucault and Polanyi, Yang's book offers a new perspective on the art of social relationships in contemporary China. Her theoretical hypothesis, generalized from personal observations and interviews, that exchange

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The China Quarterly networks are a dominating social structurein Chinese life should produce fruitful research on China in all social sciences - including anthropology, economics, political science and sociology. However, large-scale studies as well as ethnographic fieldwork will provide tests of the significance and limitations of guanxi practices. With further research effort, a more structuralexplanation of how personal networks based on kinship, friendship or other existing relationships facilitate guanxi practices, and how this is altered in light of the changes made towards a market system, is yet to be offered. In conclusion, this fascinating book touches on the nerve of the Chinese way of life and sheds light on the very core of social processes in today's China. If Norton Fried's classic The Fabric of Chinese Society taught us of the importance of social relationships in binding individuals and local communities in a more traditional township on the eve of the Chinese Communist revolution, Mayfair Yang's Gifts, Favors, and Banquets gives us the opportunity to look at a set of "gift relations" in the more complex urban society at its departurefrom state socialism. Scholars, students and lay-people alike interested in contemporary China must read this book. YANJIEBIAN

The Paradox of Power in a People's Republic of China Middle School. [Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993. By MARTINSCHOENHALS. viii + 215 pp. Hard cover ?48.00, ISBN 1-56324-188-9; paperback ?18.00, ISBN 1-56324-189-7.] This study is a welcome contributionto the small body of literaturebased on extended periods of direct observation and participation in Chinese institutions. Martin Schoenhals spent 13 months in a Chinese middle school during 1988 and 1989, observing classes, teaching English, interviewing students and teachers, and even reading students' diaries (with their permission). The focus of the book is not so much on the teaching and learning processes of secondary education as on the general role of evaluation and criticism in Chinese society. The "paradoxof power" of the title refers to the author's claim that superiors in China, be they teachers or government officials, pay a high price for their status. As they have more "face" to lose than people in lower positions they are under constant pressure to conform to social norms, because any failure to live up to the standards expected from them will be met by their inferiors' criticism and ridicule. Observations of the microcosm of the classroom are used to illustrate this point. In the classroom, the teacher of course has the power to evaluate and criticize students, but the students have their own ways of expressing their opinion of the teacher's performance,ranging from open criticism of the teaching methods to subversive activities such as talking among themselves or laughing. This constant mutual evaluation "gives a Chinese class session the character of a performance" (p. 99). Teachers are constantly "on stage," and to challenge them generates