ABSTRACT
Another issue often mentioned by our informants is the importance of their conformity to a specific cultural practice, namely the contribution of donations for all kinds of social initiatives. This topic appeared to be progressively more worthy of analysis than we had thought at the beginning. Donations serve a large variety of purposes, and different types must be distinguished among them. The various motives harboured by individual entrepreneurs for contributing them, and the manners in which they work out in actual practice tell a revealing story about the sociopolitical fabric in which foreign entrepreneurs work in China. From our interviews it has appeared that gaining prestige among county and lineage fellows in many cases is at least as important as gaining the trust of local officialdom, and that the former is usually intended to serve the latter. Also, there is a process of institutionalization of newly emerged relationships going on, engendered by the economic reforms and the role therein of foreign entrepreneurs. The broader setting of donation behaviour is important here. As mentioned before, the legitimacy assigned to the cultural resources anchored in the pre-1949 period has been further enhanced in Guangdong and Fujian provinces by the new social and economic links established with overseas-Chinese societies. Many returning emigrants expressed a feeling of belonging to a given lineage and to a given locality. Their sojourns, especially the first one after years of separation, are often narrated in local publications; the names of the visitors and the village where they originate from are always clearly stated. The restoration of such social exchanges has promoted the writing of new genealogies to clarify and reassess the complex kinship ties existing within a lineage.
