Ling Tang

Based on a three-year digital ethnography as an educational consultant on the Chinese digital platform X, I use guanxi, enduring interpersonal relationships, to explain how people voluntarily work to the extent of burning out. Drawing on literature about emotion and work in precarious labour, and especially the discussion on emotional capitalism, I demonstrate that it is not because of the lack of social connections that people engage in auto-exploitation and burning out, as Han Byung-chul argues, but precisely because of shared values and the emotions people develop for each other that people commit more to work. Complementing research on digital economic tribes, I argue that guanxi could serve as an analytical framework to decipher the buyer-seller relationship on platforms. In particular, I use two guanxi-related concepts ganqing (emotional attachments) and renqing (norms of interpersonal relationship) to explain why I worked voluntarily and obligatorily for the students I met via X.

Based on eight in-depth interviews, this article analyses the quandary faced by liberal mainland Chinese student migrants in Hong Kong. On the one hand, the liberal pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong are deeply intertwined with the rise of localism, which is based on a dichotomy between Hong Kong and mainland China. On the other hand, a rising, development-centric nationalism in mainland China reduces Hong Kong protesters to unemancipated British colonial subjects. However, in the context of this "double marginalisation," liberal Mainland students guard a form of liberalism that transcends both Hong Kong localism and Chinese nationalism. They debunk the stereotype of mainland Chinese students being apolitical and therefore provide an alternative definition of being Chinese. They challenge the view that mainland Chinese can only be emancipated outside mainland China to destabilise a Fukuyamian linear interpretation of history. They use four tactics to cope with double marginalisation: understanding localists, befriending expatriates, assuming professionalism, and becoming apolitical.

By critically incorporating the concept of erotic capital, this research, which is based on an ethnographic study of female white-collar employees, discloses the gendered and sexualized dynamics of guanxi in urban China. The research first examines the male-centred standardized routine of guanxi through a detailed analysis of yingchou, a practice consisting of banquets and post-banquet activities, which can involve the use of women as subordinate ‘erotic gifts’. Then, a four-type characterization of white-collar women is developed which demonstrates ways in which women can achieve more agentic, and potentially equal, guanxi status. The types identified in the study are: ‘pseudo-brothers’, ‘rational legal professionals’, ‘the unreachable desired’, and ‘the unspoken rules followers’. Each type has a specific way of navigating the patriarchal structure of guanxi, though boundaries between types are blurred and women may change their strategy, and therefore their type, over time.