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

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY 223
individuals who had helped them and to describe the nature of their relations with
them, in terms of such things as frequency of contact. Using the resultant data, we
can develop a better understanding of how social ties shape the life in Chinese
cities, and especially of its wealthiest inhabitants.
Table 8.5 shows how these webs of personal assistance vary with different forms
of stratified inequality. Respondents were asked whether in the previous six
months they had given/received various forms of personal assistance (economic
aid, finding a job and so on) to/from the friends they had named. The results
indicate that, although instrumental social exchanges between friends occur
relatively infrequently, it is the highest-status groups that benefit most from such
social relations, but only in quite specific ways. For example, 11.6 per cent of highincome
respondents reported that one of their friends had helped them change
jobs, and a further 5.8 per cent reported doing so through relatives. The
corresponding figures for medium-income respondents were 10.8 per cent and 8.4
per cent; for lower-income respondents, 8.3 per cent and 10.5 per cent. Until
recently, all jobs in China were supposed to be filled through state-planned
allocations, yet these figures confirm what Bian Yanjie and others have argued: that
the most successful–in this case, the wealthiest–sections of urban Chinese society
tend to have personal social networks which provide high-status individuals with
greater opportunities and resources, because of their wider reach beyond the
family (Bian Yanjie 1994, 1997). Also of note here is the fact that just under 8 per
cent of high-income respondents reported both helping and being helped to find jobs
by the friends they named; as against an average of 3 per cent for other income
groups. This provides some support for the anecdotal evidence cited above, of the
‘new rich’ middle class tending to use their personal networks to change jobs in a
chain-like process of mutual recruitment into attractive positions. In other words,
higher status can reinforce rather than weaken the importance of social ties. The
figures in Table 8.5 also indicate, however, that wealthier individuals tend to rely on
their friendship ties less for other, non-instrumental assistance such as help at
work, for personal disputes, or during illness.
The significance of these general patterns in the social lives of urban China’s
new rich becomes clearer through some examples from my fieldwork. One of
Beijing’s new rich–a manager in a large foreign-funded hotel–recounted to me how
he succeeded in enrolling his daughter in a prestigious ‘key-point’ senior middle
school, despite her living in the wrong district and having slightly less than
sufficient marks. He did this through a friend–someone who had been ‘sent down’
to the countryside during the early 1970s–who knew a senior official in the district
education bureau. After some discussions between all three, the official agreed to
use his influence to ensure that the interviewee’s daughter made it into the school.
No money or goods changed hands, but as he explained:
[the senior official’s] daughter graduates from technical college in a year or
two and then maybe he’d like me to find a place for her here [in the hotel]…