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The Wei (Positioning)-Ming(Naming)-Lianmian (Face)-Guanxi(Relationship)-Renqing(Humanized Feelings) Complex in Contemporary Chinese Culture
- State University of New York Press
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The Wei (Positioning)-Ming (Naming)-Lianmian (Face)-Guanxi (Relationship)-Renqing (Humanized Feelings) Complex in Contemporary Chinese Culture Wenshan Jia Introduction In search of a functional equivalent in indigenous Chinese culture for Roger Ames’s term “culture of authority” in his call for papers, I have identified five native Chinese terms closest to the concept of “authority.” They are wei, ming, and lianmian, guanxi and renqing. I define wei as a position or a positioning in the primary ontocosmology which should underlie any other constructed or developed system, for it is most fundamental and has everything to do with the very existence of a thing and its worth. In this sense wei can be said to define the worth and “raison d’être” of anything, particularly those of the human person. (Cheng 1996, 149). I define naming as a rhetorical instrument to bring about the exercise of wei and to translate wei into lianmian. I define lianmian as a practical social-moral construct of the Confucian personhood that stands for the very worth defined by wei. I define guanxi as the web of relationships that functions as the set of interlocking laces which connects people of different weis together. Renqing is defined as a body of symbolic and/or material resources exchanged in this web of social relations to establish or strengthen relations in a mutually emotionally satisfactory manner in order to accumulate one’s lianmian. It is used to complement naming, 49 50 Wenshan Jia since naming is merely rhetorical and does not provide practical action. The more worth is attached to a thing, particularly a person, the more power, influence, access to truth and the right to rule, which includes the rights to think, speak, reward and punish, and access to wealth and privilege the person can have. In other words, lianmian is generated by wei via ming. While wei is the hub, lianmian functions as a team of spikes with ming as the spin, renqing as the lubricating oil, and guanxi as the joints. Guanxi is not only part of the absolute reality to the Chinese, which the love of lianmian makes possible, but also it can be pulled to elevate one’s wei. Each wei is always relative and in relationship to all other weis. As a result, a culture is structured hierarchically with different members of a society voluntarily or involuntarily occupying different positions, and the culture is maintained as a culture of authority. In this paper, I argue that wei, ming, lianmian, guanxi, and renqing conjointly construct and maintain contemporary Chinese culture as a culture of relational authority despite the economic reform and social change that have taken place in the past decades. In the following, I will first conduct the critical review of the relevant scholarly literature on wei, ming, lianmian, guanxi, and renqing. Then, I will elaborate the wei-ming-lianmian-guanxi-renqing interpretive framework on the basis of the review. Furthermore, I will present several reallife cases from contemporary Chinese society and use them in illustrating the soundness of the wei-ming-lianmian-guanxi-renqing theory. Review of Scholarly Literature Many prominent studies on Chinese face practices (Ho 1976; Smith 1894; Hwang 1987; Chen 1990; Ting-Toomey 2003; Kipnis 1995), while acknowledging the relational dimension, seem to have ignored or downplayed the hierarchical nature of lianmian dynamics in Chinese culture thanks to a modern Western lens of equality. The theories used, such as the social exchange theory (Hwang, 1987), the Coordinated Management of Meaning (Chen 1990) and negotiation (Ting-Toomey 2003), all share an underlying assumption in modern Western culture that human beings are equal and individualistic. Such theories also do not take morality into consideration. These theories are primarily descriptive with the suggestion that humans are inherently free, rational, and have choices for the individual good. These ideas run counter to the Chinese Confucian normative view of humans as beings with inherent moral responsibility to cultivate themselves into gentle persons (junzi) or sages (shengren) who [34.204.52.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:53 GMT) The Wei (Positioning)-Ming (Naming) 51 are morally superior only because they are selfless and emotionally invested in the community. The ideas are also opposite to the deeply held assumption of the Chinese that humans are unavoidably placed in different positions of moral and social hierarchies; that humans are ontologically in mutual relations, yet as unequal as human fingers are not of equal length...