Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (review)

Reviews 295 be expected. But on a technical level, I do wish the contributors had been more careful and more consistent with the spelling ofChinese names and terms. Errors in this area are all over the book; let me cite a few examples. On page 69, xingfu is misspelled as "xinfu," and modengas "mo dun." On page 156, what should be Qinwang bu zhen qu is given as "Qinwan buzhenqu." Perhaps because ofmy familiarity with the history of Chinese cinema I find more errors in professor Wu's chapter on Chinese film. On page 199, die title ofthe film Hongfen kulou is incorrectly rendered as "Hongfeng kulou," and on the same page the name of the film director Zheng Zhengqiu is misspelled as "Zheng Zhenqiu." Similar mistakes are also found on page 200, where "Jiemei hua" is given for Zimei hua; and on page 204, the title ofthe film Babai zhuang shi is printed as "Babei zhuangshi," and "Shui Xinwen" is incorrecdy given for the name ofdie famous actress Su Xiuwen. Zhiwei Xiao University ofUtah Zhiwei Xiao is an assistantprofessor ofhistory specializing in studies ofChinesefilm. MayfairMei-huiYang. Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: TheArt ofSodai Relationships in China. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. 370 pp. Hardcover $42.50, isbn 0-8014-2343-0. Paperback $18.95, ISBN 0-8014-9592-x. When Mayfair Mei-hui Yang set foot on mainland China in 1981 as an exchange student in anthropology from Berkeley, she immediately became conscious ofone of the most powerful and yet least understood institutions in China at that time. It was not the Chinese Communist Party, the Stalinist planned economy, or the Chinese family. Rather it was an institution, amorphous but ever-present, unwritten but clearly recognized, unorganized and unofficial and yet quite powerful, which permeated and to some extent suffocated die lives ofall Chinese, especially diose living in urban areas. This institution is guanxi, the web ofsocial connections . It was an institution that was both familiar and strange, and it provided Yang not only an excellent, though extremely challenging, subject for her research , but also a key to understanding contemporary China.© 1996 by UniversityYang>s fieldwork m Chinain me early19gos and ln me decade following, guided by her penetrating insight into social institutions and relationships in China and elsewhere, resulted in the publication ofa very important paper by her in 1989 ("The Gift Economy and State Power in China," Comparative Studies in 296 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 Society and History 31 (January): 25-54). After five years ofwaiting, we finally have the pleasure ofan entire book from her devoted to diis most fascinating and little-understood Chinese institution. No one who had any contact with Chinese society in the late 1970s and early 1980s could have failed to be aware ofthe extreme importance ofguanxi. Guanxi was, at that time in particular, a far more useful resource than the official "People's Currency" (Renminbi)—or any other currency for that matter. It was a necessity ofdaily life. From getting meat and vegetables to getting a job, an apartment, or a hospital bed for a dying patient, one needed to have guanxi. But what is guanxi and why does it exist in China? In tiiis groundbreaking book, Yang takes us beyond the common perceptions concerning guanxi in socialist China—for example, that the use ofguanxi comes from a Chinese tradition that relied heavily on family, kin, and friendship ties, that the Cultural Revolution destroyed die social fabric of modern China and this resulted in a massive resort to guanxi, and that the expansion ofguanxiwang (guanxi network) was a result of China's opening to the West. What is most significant about guanxi, according to Yang, is its role in Chinese society vis-à-vis the socialist state. Under the state socialism that is practiced in China, there are three types ofeconomy: the state redistributive economy, the gift economy, and a resurgent commodity economy. The formation ofthe gift economy, similar to the "second economy" in Eastern European societies under socialism, was a popular Chinese response to the state redistributive economy. Chinese citizens needed not only to have an economic currency oftheir own to supplement and to some...