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

224 STRATIFICATION AND MOBILITY IN URBAN CHINA
Table 8.5 Frequency of different forms of personal help in urban Beijing friendship networks
(%) (N=1168)*
Notes:
Admin.: help or advice with administrative procedures or difficulties
Finding a job: help or advice with finding or changing jobs
Economic hardship: help or advice with economic hardship
At work: help or advice with problems at work
Domestic: help or advice with domestic responsibilities
Personal dispute: help or advice with a personal dispute
Illness: help or advice with illness.
*Respondents provided multiple answers to this question.
That’s how it is. We go back a long way, so I’d be happy to help my friend,
and his friend too. It’s not a who-owes-who sort of deal.
To sum up this section: in China’s cities, and more particularly in Beijing, the
interpersonal relations of residents not only reflect the patterns of occupational,
educational and income stratification; they play an important active role in creating
and reproducing those patterns. They do this by giving individuals unequal access
to scarce resources and opportunities: friends and acquaintances can be an
important source of help in finding a job, changing housing, securing a loan, and so
on. As a source of material assistance and information, as well as emotional support,
such social ties are a vital element in understanding the behaviour and outlook of
China’s ‘new rich’. Although these guanxi relations tend to be represented as
involving purely economic transactions, they are more often based on longstanding
interpersonal ties based on common experience and social status.