ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the rise of nonverbal functions in online interactions in liquid guanxi, setting the stage for new rules of tie-maintenance. Analyzing interviews with Hong Kong youth and statistical data from the Chinese General Social Survey, this chapter traces how likes are reimagined as a digital gift of renqing representing targeted attention from specific giver-identities that generates circuits of likes exchanged between participants for tie-maintenance. Across all dyadic guanxi ties of different tie strengths, participants felt a constant renqing debt demanding repayment. As such, tie-maintenance in liquid guanxi requires a baseline frequency of like exchange: even if actors felt offended when alters neglected reciprocity altogether, they continued giving likes for fear of damaging their reputation and relationship. At a population level, even though SNS use may afford new rules of tie-maintenance with likes, it does not damper the desire for reciprocity itself foundational to traditional guanxi. More informatively, SNS use is associated with greater corporate institutional trust among youth and non-youth alike. Liquid guanxi is thus characterized by a broadening form of social trust in the large private corporations that own major digital platforms that govern everyday social connectivity, access to news, and economic transactions.
