Gifts, Favors, and Banquets

An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train...

Mayfair Yang is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China.

To what extent did traditional customs and practices persist under the surface during the decades of Mao's rule, or are present forms a genuine revival? To what extent do these revivals testify to the enduring strength of the Chinese cultural tradition or are they to be explained much more as reflections of popular experiences during the socialist and reform eras' Mayfair Yang's book represents one of the most ambitious and systematic attempts to deal with a whole range of such questions.

Gary G. Hamilton:

I heartily recommend this book. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the meaning of social relationships in Chinese society.

F. B. Bessac, Choice, Vol. 32, 1995:

This is an important and exciting book, a must for all students of Chinese social organization and for all those interested in how the human realm may reassert itself within the absolute state.

George Marcus, University of California, Irvine:

This is an admirably accomplished effort in critical ethnography to define a key cultural formation—that of guanxi—and then to demonstrate its complex traces, resonances, and effects in the events, small and large, of contemporary China.

Gregor Benton, China Information, Vol. 10, 1995:

This fine and original study, the first of its sort, on guanxixue, the 'art of connections' that pervades social relationships in China, teems with ideas and theories and makes sense of encounters that will ring loud bells in the ears of anyone who has lived in mainland China.

Gene Cooper, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 12, 1994:

Mayfair Yang has produced a stimulating book on an important subject that is as ill-studied as it is pervasive in Chinese social life. No social scientist working on contemporary Chinese issues should be without this book, and interested laymen and undergraduates will find it indispensable in making sense of contemporary China.

Prasenjit Duara, The University of Chicago:

Gifts, Favors and Banquets is a pioneering work that has become the indispensable reference work for the ever-burgeoning studies of guanxi. It is an extraordinarily thick ethnography that reveals years of research, analysis, and a talent for storytelling.

Delia Davin, Asia Affairs, Vol. 12, 1994:

Dr. Yang has produced an original and readable study of the way that Chinese build and use networks in social, work and political life. The importance of 'guanxi' or 'connections' in life in the People's Republic has often been commented on. Good guanxi can make all the difference in bringing off business deals, getting into the best schools and hospitals, and obtaining jobs and accommodation. Goods in scarce supply, travel tickets and special foods may also be obtained through guanxi when they are not available for straightforward purchase... This is an excellent study of an important subject.