I'm always amused when people project a Western-centric viewpoint when talking about China. This has very little to do with Communism and everything to do with China's own history and cultural development.
Chinese culture has always placed a strong emphasis on interpersonal relationships because institutions besides the state have always been relatively weak, and the agents of the state formed a close-knit, elite class that interacted with one another personally.
For over two thousand years, the state bureaucracy has been the strongest institution in China at the local levels. Even during the Nationalist period and in pre-modern times, you'd better believe the average person would a good relationship with their local official if they wanted to get anything done effectively.
Controlling nepotism and corruption within the bureaucracy has been a perennial concern during every single dynasty of China, going all the way to the Qin dynasty in 200 B.C.
Also, you definitely need good interpersonal networks to do business effectively in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, despite the fact that none of those polities have experienced direct Communist rule.
The Communists in China were actually markedly less corrupt than the Nationalist officials they replaced, and in fact the corruption of the Nationalist administration was one reason they lost the Civil War.
Remember that China was still basically a pre-industrial nation in 1949 -- it's hard to have impartial, clean institutions in a nation of China's size without modern communications and mass culture.
I'm pretty sure Romania was a more modern place than China was before WW2, so imposing a Communist system was a step backwards, but that doesn't generalize to China's experience.
So yes, Romanian experience is very relatable to this aspect of China.
[*] i.e. which unobtainable food items are coveted most.
My father would strongly disagree. Communists paid for his education from elementary school and up to college, and made sure he didn't end up doing small scale agriculture like his parents and grandparents.
Before 1940 Romania did have some industry, capital and civilization, true. But if counted by either population or area, a supermajority was simply subsistence agriculture. Communists razed it down, built industry and mechanized agriculture in its place, and crammed people into cities and towns. I'd guess that up to the early 70s it was actually a force for progress, even if only for breaking up old power structures.
After that it was the usual trade-off - less appliances, electronics and luxury goods, but a more relaxed and secure life style. Until 1980, when rumor has it that Ceausescu visited North Korea and fell in love with it. After that things changed, he pushed strongly for full debt payment, and the population suffered.
In communist societies this functional mechanism is quasi inexistent and the only thing that keeps that society running is the guanxi . China may have its specific form but I'd say that it is rooted in our deeper human pshichological traits that are common to all of us.
I live in an ex-communist state and we're still struggling with such a guanxi that trancends all major political parties and state institutions, after 26 years since we've "transitioned to democracy".
The major problem is that this close-knit, closed, state parasite is blocking any change and any advancement in society.
Actually, that happens in all sort of societies that are not Legal-Rational Liberal-Capitalist.
I'm not sure you got it right. Price discrimination and other market mechanisms existed, more or less, in communist societies too. The problem was that there was this seller's market. A lot of things were scarce, be it natural or artificial scarcity (a gatekeepers induced one), and besides the fact that the supplier could inflate the price a lot, you still had to have connections to have a chance to the bid. Excluding the communist idealistic selfless individuals that did their job as best as they could indiscriminately, the norm was for people to leverage their positions. For one, this way they created "markets" for their supplied services or access to goods. For another, this is how you get what you have or do to worth anything in the eyes of others. So this was besides the currency based market. It was a favor based market that overlapped the first.
You had the Church vying against various pre-modern states for political power, and in the shuffle there were also entire towns and regions that had de facto autonomy, as well as guilds and other medieval institutions that were allowed to mind their own business.
In that vigorous competitive environment, you would expect that cleaner, less corrupt, and more transparent institutions would tend to survive. The way these institutions worked were aggressively copied across Europe, as nations vigorously competed with one another to modernize and survive.
In that framework, you would see Communism as a big step back -- instead of clean, independent institutions on the 'Western' model, just replace everything with the state.
China, on the other hand, was basically still a pre-modern state into the 20th century, and hadn't had non-corrupt institutions since the mid Qing dynasty. Pre-modern China had no large nationwide institutions except the state -- its communications technology lagged Europe's, and it also had a huge population.
Just over a hundred years ago, the de facto ruler of China, the Empress Dowager Cixi took all the funds earmarked for naval fleets and dumped into building a palace instead.
The Chinese Nationalists who eventually overthrew her in 1911 spent the next few decades failing to control endemic corruption at all levels of government. One of the reasons that the Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war was due to the deep dissatisfaction everyone had at their pervasive corruption.
In fact, corruption at the bottom rungs of the bureaucracy basically didn't exist under Mao and was aggressively weeded out--corrupt officials were regularly imprisoned and shot. For the average Chinese person, Communist rule, despite its own problems, was a large step forward in terms of quality of life and quality of governance.
TL;DR - Communism in Eastern Europe was probably a step back, but in China it was an improvement on what existed before. Guanxi is how things get done when you don't have strong institutions.
Totally agree.
I am saying that from a point on, guanxi is the reason you don't have strong institutions, precisely because they tend to form close-knit circles of power that prevent the forming of strong institutions. It's a vicious circle.
At least for me, it's more like a communist thing with Chinese flavor than a Chinese thing with communism flavor.
Actually it is more complicated than it appears. As you can see, the whole urbanization process of China happens after communist took power. Many rules in the cities are new, and it's hard to say that the rules take places because of Chinese culture or because of communism, usually both.
One thing that is certainly communism-related is that, because of planned economy and a very restricted market, some very basic things were on a shortage and you need "guanxi" for that. My mom recalls that 40 yrs ago ladies wanted to marry butchers (or the one who sells pork), just because they got more power due to the position they were on. You see Radu mentioned that people get extra half bread due to relations. My parents used to need ticket to buy rice and pork etc. That's where you need some "guanxi" to do basic things. Also, to go to hospitals one needs some "guanxi" because medical resources are limited (and price where controlled). Should it be a free market, private hospitals would be built and shortage would fall.
TL;DR: Because communist countries government grab so much power in their hands, "guanxi" plays a more important role than it used to be.
The importance of a relatively free market should never be underestimated. And Chinese people certainly needs a smaller government. Even today, the market is not as free as it could be and the government is still taking too much power (they made a lot of progress with that power though). It's a much bigger government than any democrats would imagine, bigger than a big government in American common sense!
For example in Thailand I see Guanxi all the time, granted that it's firmly in the Chinese sphere-of-influence. But I bet if you go to some Central America Bureaucracy and you'll see the same thing.
