ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author concentrates on friendship as an idiom of interaction: a way of talking about relationships, rather than a set of criteria which can define them. In Chinese societies, friendship must be seen in the context of other idioms of interaction. To deal adequately with friendship in Chinese societies, the readers need to begin with examining the parallels, differences and relationships with the member's concept. Friendship in China offered assurances and an intimacy that the readers have abandoned in America; it gave the Chinese psychic as well as material rewards, that their have lost. While friendship is frequently appropriated by guanxi, it is also friendship that is most often set up in contrast to guanxi in popular discourse. Notions of friendship are expressed in the different categories of "heart-to-heart friends" and friends who use each other, a contrast that follows the distinction between expressive or emotional friendship and instrumental friendship'.
