ABSTRACT
The enabling and constraining properties of guanxi networking culture, its networking mechanisms, and network-level consequences in personal networks in modern China have been extensively studied in a large and growing literature since Fei Xiaotong’s celebrated From the Soil. In conversation with this literature, this chapter analyzes the transformations imparted by SNSs on guanxi and argues that the digitalization of interactions on SNSs is rendering guanxi networks in China more liquid. This chapter theorizes the expressions of this liquidity across five cultural and psychological rules of networking (tie-creation, tie-maintenance, tie-activation, geographical proximity, and information flow) that consist guanxi. This chapter contributes to the study of guanxi, social networks, and Chinese society in general by articulating a sociological account of the changing nature of social relations in an age of digitalization and the consequences of liquid guanxi networks for shifting Fei’s original vision of modernity in Chinese thought and society from amoral familism to social integration.
