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

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY 225
REPUTATION, CONSUMPTION AND GETTING
AHEAD IN URBAN CHINA
So far I have described the social characteristics and position of urban Beijing’s
new rich, as well as the dynamic way in which urban Chinese must cultivate and
use their social connections in order to get ahead. But how does this help us to
understand the cultural identity of Beijing’s ‘new rich’? How and why do they create
social boundaries based on their lifestyles, values and behaviour, thereby
identifying themselves and excluding others? In this final section, I will argue that
social networks, and a general concern for personal reputation, help to explain why
certain patterns of distinction, based on consumption and status objects, define the
cultural identity of urban China’s new rich. If cultural markers are thought of as
status signals used to locate particular status groups, then we would expect that
these cultural markers would be most important in frequent and close interactions
with others. For it is in such situations that a person’s perceived reputation,
influence and trustworthiness matter most. Given the important role that
interpersonal ties, in general, play in Chinese social life, we can expect that the
markers of status based on culture will be unusually prominent and important.
Clifford Geertz applies a similar line of reasoning to analyse the behaviour of
merchants in Morocco’s souk market (Geertz 1979). He notes that the market is
characterised by general uncertainty and poor information, and this has a decisive
effect on the merchants’ social organisation and behaviour:
The level of ignorance about everything from product quality and going
prices to market possibilities and production costs is very high, and a great
deal of the way in which the bazaar is organised and functions (and within it,
the ways its various sorts of participants behave) can be interpreted as either
an attempt to reduce such ignorance for someone, increase it for someone, or
defend someone against it The search for information–laborious, uncertain,
complex, and irregular–is the central experience of life in the bazaar, an
enfolding reality its institutions at once create and respond to. Virtually every
aspect of the bazaar economy reflects the fact that the primary problem
facing the farmer, artisan, merchant, or consumer is not balancing options
but finding out what they are.
(Geertz 1979:124—5)
In spite of the vastly different setting, Geertz’s observations also ring true for
creating and keeping wealth under late-Deng market socialism, where, as we have
seen, actions such as business deals, changing jobs and finding suitable employees
are all, to some extent, at the mercy of market uncertainty ‘and bureaucratic
flexibility. This is suggested in the rich variety of norms, affinities and obligations
expressed in terms such as ‘face’ (mianzi), ‘connection’ (guanxi) and ‘sentiment’
(renqing) that are found in modern Chinese culture (Yang 1994; Pieke 1995). Much
like Geertz’s traders, the Beijing residents I inter viewed were seeking, in various