Two Diverging Roads: A Semantic Network Analysis of Chinese Social Connection (“Guanxi”) on Twitter

Abstract

Guanxi, roughly translated as "social connection," is a term commonly used in the Chinese language. In this study, we employed a linguistic approach to explore popular discourses on guanxi. Although sharing the same Confucian roots, Chinese communities inside and outside Mainland China have undergone different historical trajectories. Hence, we took a comparative approach to examine guanxi in Mainland China and in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau (TW-HK-M). Comparing guanxi discourses in two Chinese societies aim at revealing the divergence of guanxi culture. The data for this research were collected on Twitter over a three-week period by searching tweets containing guanxi written in simplified Chinese characters (关系) and in traditional Chinese characters (關係). After building, visualizing, and conducting community detection on both semantic networks, two guanxi discourses were then compared in terms of their major concept sub-communities. This study aims at addressing two questions: Has the meaning of guanxi transformed in contemporary Chinese societies? And how do different socio-economic configurations affect the practice of guanxi? Results suggest that guanxi in interpersonal relationships has adapted to a new family structure in both Chinese societies. In addition, the practice of guanxi in business varies in Mainland China and in TW-HK-M. Furthermore, an extended domain was identified where guanxi is used in a macro-level discussion of state relations. Network representations of the guanxi discourses enabled reification of the concept and shed lights on the understanding of social connections and social orders in contemporary China.

An Integrated Economic Sociology Approach to Market-as-Network: The Example of a Shared Business Environment between Norway and China

“…In the example of China, the functional role of interpersonal relations broadly encompassed the concept of guanxi 关系 (in simplified Chinese), has played a foundational role in creating a cohesive society and business environment both domestically and abroad. It is within the nuanced concept of guanxi that communicative social codes are formed, taught, perpetuated, and applied in social behavior (Yan et al 2017). In a study that evaluated traditional Chinese cultural beliefs, it was found that the respondents felt that traditional values were still important, even if it was perceived that relationship building styles had become replaced in the business context by more Westernized values (Willis and Quan 2009).…”

“…Ethnographic research conducted during the 1990s found that guanxi is often associated with sentiments (renqing, 人 情 , gangqing 感 情 ), face (mianzi 面 子 ), gifts (liwu 礼 物 ) deliberately maintained and cultivated to facilitate other social activities (Leung and Chan 2003;Smart 1999;Wong and Chan 1999;Yang 1994). More recent studies have found that guanxi dynamics might change and thus needs to be refined as Chinese societies undergo dramatic socio-economic and political changes (Berger et al 2018;Yan et al 2017).…”

Variations in the adoption and use of mobile social apps in everyday lives in urban and rural China

“…Many empirical studies have found Chinese social media users seeking out social connections ( guanxi ; L. Chen et al, 2017; Yan & Yasseri, 2017), but many of these connections are based on sharing the same hometown (Wang, 2016) and among close relationships (Cui, 2015). We hypothesize that rural users have smaller social networks on WeChat because of geographical constraints and lack of social connections (H2).…”

A Biased Review of Biases in Twitter Studies on Political Collective Action

“…Examining social influence, Bakshy et al [8] study Twitter cascades, and find that the largest are started by past influential users with many followers. Semantic investigations in various languages and national contexts have been quite popular [9][10][11]. Questions of how Twitter and platform phenomena map onto offline geographic have also been widely studied [12,13].…”