ABSTRACT
Family occasions, such as wedding and birthday celebrations, are often used to cement business relationships. One private entrepreneur we met in the course of our interviews, a Mr Wang, kindly invited us to his daughter’s wedding. During the course of the wedding banquet, he was constantly calling out to one brother or another, and we remarked to his wife how fortunate it was for people of her husband’s generation to be able to have so many. She laughed and said that those her husband had been calling brothers were not related to him at all. They were ‘business friends’.
