ABSTRACT

When I was doing my doctoral research in China in the early 1990s, like most graduate students, I did not have much money. Overall, China was still much cheaper than the United States, but Shanghai was fairly pricey, so the organization that sponsored my research, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, helped me find a job teaching English to supplement my income. In the class I taught, I had one student, a middleaged man named Mr. Zhang, who was extremely friendly and asked me often if he could take me out for an evening. It felt odd to me to accept the invitation, because the student had made clear that he wanted to treat me to a night out, and average people in China in the early 1990s had even less money than I did, but eventually I accepted. The evening began with dinner in a private room of an expensive Shanghai restaurant, where we were joined by another individual the student introduced to me as a friend of his, Mr. Li. When the bill came, I offered to pay, but Mr. Zhang insisted on treating. He leaned in close at one point and said cryptically, “Maybe you can help me in another way sometime.” A few days later, I received a call from Mr. Li, the “friend” who had accompanied us at dinner. He said that he was interested in practicing his English and that Zhang had told him I would be willing to help him. I was a little confused, as I did not recall making such an agreement, but, remembering Zhang’s comment about helping him in “another way,” I decided to

meet with Li and help him with his English. As the discussion unfolded over three or four meetings, I gradually came to understand that our transaction (me teaching Li English for free) was part of an extended series of social obligations and debts. In short, Zhang had treated me to an expensive dinner in order to manufacture some level of obligation with me, so that I could then be called upon to give Li English lessons. Li, it turned out, was the doctor of Zhang’s ailing mother. And while Li did not have enough money to afford English lessons from a foreign teacher, he did control a very valuable asset-the allocation of beds in his overcrowded hospital. Zhang’s mother was often sick enough that she required hospital care, and Zhang spent a lot of time worrying about whether she would receive the proper treatment when she was hospitalized. I came to understand that, in essence, my free English lessons to Li were helping to manufacture the debt that would ensure a hospital bed and quality hospital care for Zhang’s mother. By the time I understood the web of social relationships I was entangled in, I was fascinated at the extended plans that lay behind what I initially thought was a simple invitation to dinner. It left me wondering about the rules of the gift economy in China. It also left me wondering what would happen to the gift economy as the economic reforms progressed.