Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

220 STRATIFICATION AND MOBILITY IN URBAN CHINA
confronting booksellers in China. He also found his son’s company a military unit
to act as its sponsor (guakao danwei), thereby insulating it from other branches of
government. In these ways he was able to give one son a decisive boost in
founding his business.
What this example illustrates is the crucial role of social connections (guanxi) in
shaping and defining routes to success in contemporary urban China (Blau et al.
1991; Ruan 1993; Yang 1994), and therefore their crucial role in shaping the social
relations and behaviour of the ‘new rich’. For, if, as we have seen, wealth, skills,
power and influence are the scarce resources that decide who gets ahead in urban
Beijing, then people who have access to those resources are also an important
ingredient in success. In other words, social connections with people who have
access to valuable information, influence and resources are in themselves a kind of
‘capital’ that can be cultivated, sustained and called up in times of need (Coleman
1988). These connections may be, as in the above example, familial or, as in many
other cases I encountered in my fieldwork, based on other relations–work
colleagues, old school friends, old army ties, and so on. 6 In this sense, the social
structure is not an inert cage deciding people’s fates, but rather a possible resource
that can be exploited by those in the right position.
In this section, I will examine how social ties, and the resources they contain, are
an important factor in determining status attainment in urban Chinese society. The
third and final section will examine how the cultural identity of the new rich in
urban China–defined in terms of their lifestyle, values and material culture–is in
many respects a reflection of that fact. To complement the statistical data, which
deal with non-kin ties, I draw on interviews and observation to gauge the
importance of kin relations.
Again, before focusing on the new rich as a special category, I will first examine
the general role of interperonal relations in urban Chinese life. In the survey,
respondents were asked to list the friends with whom they had had significant
contact in the previous six months. Table 8.4 is a cross-tabulation of the social
class of the friends named by respondents.
These and the corresponding data on education, political status and work-unit
status show how individuals’ social networks are heavily shaped by the same
patterns of social stratification we examined in the first section. Once more, what is
most striking is how the personal relations of the cadre and professional
occupational classes are extremely homogeneous. Slightly over half of
professionals’ friendship ties are with other professionals, and nearly two-thirds of
cadres’ friendship ties are either with other cadres (36.2 per cent) or with
professionals (22.7 per cent). Measured in terms of gender, educational status and
political status, similar patterns of stratification emerge in personal social networks.
These data provide support for what other recent studies in China have found,
namely that, as in all modern societies, urban Chinese people’s social relations are
shaped by the prevailing patterns of stratification and status distinction, and that
high-status individuals socialise most among their own status peers (Ruan 1993;
Yang 1994). Turning to the survey respondents with incomes of over 1,000 yuan