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This is always proffered as a trait of Chinese culture but I'm skeptical. Connections in this respect are a feature of business everywhere, at all times. The societies that have minimized connections are all WEIRD (Haidt).
I think that "Guanxi" satisfies some deep Chinese need for everything to be catalogued and systematized. They like reifying things. It's not just who you know, it's Guanxi. It's not just networking, it's Guanxi. Likewise their penchant for Lists (Four Great Novels, The Three Principles of the People, The One Hundred Years of Humiliation, etc.). And it's fine if you can observe that it's better to win than to lose, but it helps if you can find the relevant quotation from the Art of War from Master Sun.
That’s true. I think what they mean though is that it’s often a substitute mechanism for doing business in places where institutional controls are weak or non-existent. One mistake people often make in doing business in Russia for instance is they grossly underestimate the role that informal patronage networks play in power dynamics. That isn’t just a problem in doing business there in 2026. It was one thing historians of WW2 pointed out in Hitler’s massive miscalculation to invade the Soviet Union:
“All we have to do is kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.”
The exact opposite of that happened and people ran into the arms of “Papa” Stalin, even as he was brutally oppressing them. Look at China throughout the ages as you just did but with a bit of an adjustment. The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks). In the west we neither have a history nor a system like that. If you want you could say “merit” and social recognition in a basic sense play a role and sometimes even a strong role, but it’s not like it is in the rest of the world.
I find this incredibly difficult to take seriously. Medieval and Renaissance Europe was full of patronage networks, as was Rome (and its client states), and the Sui-Tang period is precisely the point in history where China develops the institution of meritocratic examinations for the civil service. If anything, you would expect the reverse.
You’re talking about the later part of the Tang Dynasty. I don’t know how well read you are on its history. The first thing you encounter when reading about it was its aristocratic beginnings.
It was your family pedigree that was crucial to maintaining high office, and marriages were arranged between powerful clans to maintain influence. That’s practically the textbook definition of a government ran on a patronage system. The closest analog you may have to had in Europe would probably be something like the Habsburg-style, power consolidation.
But anyway, it wasn’t until the 7th century onward that power shifted away from the influence of these families. That was when you saw the Keju system expand and you had educated, talented individuals without aristocratic backgrounds to gain power. (Which is the imperial civil service examinations you’re talking about.)
You did, however, say this:
Setting aside that the Tang was itself founded in the 7th century and that the expansion of the imperial examinations occurred in the early Tang, I took to understand as continuing throughout the Tang, and which — while having some truth even in the post-Zhou era, is decidedly less true of China at that point compared to any other state in the world at that time.
In any case, a few points.
You yourself identify that the 科舉 keju examination system in fact precedes the Tang, which already should suggest that despite the small scale and minor role of the examinations, the Sui state was already looking for ways to decrease the impact of personal networks by introducing relatively objective measures. Even prior to the expansion of the keju, the Sui and the Tang (as well as previous Chinese states) would try to minimise the danger of guanxi-based relationships to the state and the bureaucracy through methods like the 回避制 huibi zhi (known as the law of avoidance†) to prevent officials from developing regional power bases that could challenge central authority; the Sui administrative reforms that abolished hereditary offices, centralised appointments to regional offices (instead of succession by local elites), regular evaluations of regional officials, …etc. So the Sui and early Tang state was already moving towards relative meritocracy against established patronage systems, even before the examination system exploded in importance with Wu Zetian and especially during the turbulent late Tang period where the clans gradually lose importance (as you correctly point out).
The early (and even mid-late) Tang court was indeed dominated by aristocrats, and the emperor in fact did appoint members of the Longxi Li clan who were close in kinship to governorships and military command. However it is important to note a few things. Princely appointments to commanderies were a counterweight to local elites, but the princes appointed were also constrained by the centrally appointed bureaucracy who were nominally subordinate (and who often would report not to the princes, but to their own ministry). These appointments were both to prevent local elites from consolidating power as well as designed to not let princes actually utilise them as independent administrative/economic bases (hardly surprising given that Tang Taizong gained the throne through fratricide). And of course, early Tang emperors often relied extensively on non-kin (and even poor commoner in the case of Wei Zheng, for example) advisors and officials.
In this way even the early Tang state was very far from a patrimonial state like you seem to suggest, and its institutions served to depower the relatively informal and relational basis of power since the Jin in favour of a legible formal bureaucracy (even if the aristocracy was massively overrepresented in this bureaucracy, and that patronage networks functioned within these — as they still do today!).
(It should be noted that central authority did weaken during the Six Dynasties period between the Han and Sui, which saw a resurgence in the importance of aristocratic elites. Some methods to curb the power of large landowning clans, such as 均田制 juntian zhi (equal-field system), ended up backfiring in the end as well either through elite co-opting, change in policy, or shifting of the sociopolitical climate. The argument that some sort of guanxi DNA is indelibly woven into the Chinese psyche would likely do better in reference to the turbulent Jin dynasty rather than the Tang.)
† A pre-existing norm since the Han
I am in fact less familiar with details of European history, but my understanding was that familia and clientela relationships defined most, if not all, of Roman society; and that Roman politics operated more or less through networks of personal obligation (even if dispersed or distant), with heavy reliance on intermarriage, family alliances, patronage and sponsorship of other politicians, mobilisation of patronage networks during the republic in order to secure posts for clients, legions/the praetorian guard installing their favoured general as emperor…the list goes on. Even the “Five Good Emperors” — which was itself fairly extraordinary in Roman history in its frank merit-based succession, if I recall correctly — were appointments made off personal relation mixed with informal judgement of merit, rather than any sort of formal meritocracy.
This is in contradistinction to the Chinese, who even before the keju had at least tried to formalise methods to draw out talent from the base population through systems of recommendation that required magistrates to assess and promote local talents (with quotas based off households) in the 察舉制 chaju zhi system, in an attempt to address blatant nepotism†; oral and textual examinations in the court of these identified talents via 對策 duice, in which candidates were interviewed in front of the court‡; formalised bureaucratic education in the establishment of the 太學 taixue state academy which allowed non-aristocrats to gain merit and access to the court; etc.
This is not to say that Rome did not have its (informal) equivalents to the above. A fair few novus homo (like Cato the Elder and Cicero) were able to rise to the patrician class during the republic through great distinction, after all (although it also rather reinforces the idea that the aristocracy was otherwise quite closed), and many Roman emperors were from non-patrician backgrounds (e.g. Diocletian, Vespasian, …). Roman elites also obviously had education (either familial or through tutoring) for their children, and republican Rome (at least until the end) also had social institutions that was expected of an aspiring senator to in the cursus honorum. However as far as I understand it, Rome retained a greater aristocratic culture, with a greater emphasis on personal connections, and with none of the formal institutions that early-mid imperial Chinese states established in attempts to curtail nepotism.
And if we go a bit further into the early medieval period we get feudalism, which is literally a network of personal connections and reciprocal obligations between lords and vassals (at various levels), with extremely high importance placed on bloodline and marriage alliances, etc. In fact, during this exact period of time, Europe was moving towards an even more clientelist system than the Roman system, while China was moving towards the opposite. The papacy and episcopacy were also notoriously family- and connection-based; were cardinal-nephews not literally the central case for which the word nepotism is coined?
If the above is correct, then China in fact has almost always been less prone to this sort of guanxi ever since its unification under the Qin until at least the early modern era, albeit in the context that premodern states by necessity rely much more heavily on informal connections, especially at a local level, and perhaps excepting the Sima Jin.
† This was not very successful in the long run, but hey, at least Han Wudi tried?
‡ This, again, was not very successful in the long run. The entire process was full of holes, from candidates successfully gaming selection criteria of 孝廉 xiaolian, to families forming (or having existing) relationships with examiners. But hey, at least they tried, and that’s more than can be said for the rest of the world at this time. The nine-rank system that replaced the chajuzhi in Wei and Jin also became co-opted by the aristocracy quite quickly.
Much of the above suggests another thing as well: a lineage attempting to nepotism itself into absolute power within a state might encourage cultivating guanxi with the sovereign (or proxies and appendages of the sovereign), but it cannot tolerate other families, clans, and associations trying to guanxi themselves into power, and as such would find alternative methods — such as meritocracy — to develop loyalty and staff the state bureaucracy. After all, the imperial family of each Chinese dynasty were obviously patrimonial institutions, but that didn’t stop the Song or the Ming from being meritocratic for their day.
And in any case, despite some cultural idiosyncrasies in its performance, much of the modern phenomenon of guanxi is in my impression closer to things like royal/papal/aristocratic patronage of artisans or workshops, or the “old boys’ club”, phrases which refer to obviously western institutions; and which has existed essentially in every society in some form or another. I also think there’s probably a reasonable case to be made that the guanxi system that we see today owes its modern form to the relative disorder and anarchy present from the late Qing all the way to the end of the Cultural Revolution; this dovetails with your observation that:
I don’t really see the weight of this objection being substantive. It seems we disagree more with where we choose to put the emphasis of things, not what the content of the matter actually is. I suppose my biggest pushback is what you’re doing with Roman history in particular. What’s significant in the case of the Roman psyche was that the Roman Republic was founded in opposition to monarchs. And the history you bring to bear about its patronage system was a multiple centuries long struggle in wars after wars to prevent that kind of thing from happening (which it was never able to), from the transition of the Republic all the way down to its decline as an Empire. My original point has not to do with some academic history lesson about either case, it has to do with the fact that while “networking” plays a role in every society, China placed much more emphasis on it in periods throughout its history relative to other societies; and was deeply embedded in its governance structures in a way that Europeans didn’t have an analog (yes; they tried it too, but again it wasn’t like the systems you had in Asia).
And the point of the "history lesson" was to illustrate that I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about when you say that China placed much more emphasis on networking as part of the state, especially during the early Tang as you specify, when to my eyes European states were as or even more networking-based -- both prior to, contemporary with, and after the Tang, despite the pretensions of the Roman Republic.
Don’t know what to tell you then. When I read ancient Chinese history it’s continuously punctuated from end to end and at every level by state and clan coevolution, large cooperative family structures for administering intensive rural agriculture, not to mention the whole Confucian influence of “Familism,” it’s there everywhere you look; whereas it’s also “there” in certain areas of Roman history, but the Romans themselves considered that kind of behavior an anathema.
The focus on the family unit, and obligations arising within such, is hardly unique to China in the premodern world. And despite the Confucian sheen on this, early Chinese states really did develop institutions in an attempt to move away from "I know a guy" as a recruitment strategy. That doesn't scream "was more of an integral part of the state apparatus than in other polities" to me.
Confucian ethics also would not necessarily disapprove of submitting to formal, legible state power, as a legitimate part of the Confucian hierarchy; the 五倫 wu lun (five cardinal relations) includes the ruler-subject relation, and in some Confucian interpretations — e.g. in the Xunzi (noting that Xunzi had not been marginalised in the early Tang, and Mengzi had not been canonised as such yet) and in the Doctrine of the Mean — this is placed above familial relations. Thus the focus on family does not necessarily imply approval of the sort of informal patronage characterised by, say, the Jin aristocratic landlords.
This I do not understand. The hostility of Romans to regnum affectare is all well and good, but did this not occur hand-in-hand with celebration of the aristocratic patronage system, which was seen as an important civic institution (especially early in the Republic)? Extensive informal patronage networks throughout society and absolute authority seem rather opposed to me.
(In fact this is mirrored by the Chinese example — aristocratic clans often had the most to lose when the sovereign, or the state, consolidates power.)
There is a potential somewhat-adjacent avenue that I think might grasp at what you really mean (esp. with the gesture at the co-evolution of clan and state):
Some hiccups with this model exist (e.g. I’m hesitant to map India, Iran, or even Russia onto these categorisations), and I’m not sure there’s meat on this bone, but I think it’s an interesting thing to ponder.
Or perhaps it is the reverse — the philosophical innovation of subordinating the family as a part of a “greater family” in the state may have allowed early Chinese states to form with less resistance (and where other polities would’ve failed to divert loyalty from a tribe to a state).
Both of these are, however, significantly more bounded than “China placed much more emphasis on it in periods throughout its history relative to other societies” or that networking “was deeply embedded in its governance structures in a way that Europeans didn’t have an analog”.
† Fukuyama did glibly call Qin China the first modern state, after all.
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