Cultivating Guanxi Networks: Actual Logic Of Private Business Owner

Since the beginning of reform and opening up, given the particularity of the privately-run enterprises in China, they are the hotpot and key problem of research. They attract the attention of many research fields such as sociology, economics, economic sociology, institutional economics. In the study of these fields, almost all the researchers choose the privately-run enterprises in the south field as their object of study, but the development of private business lacks attention. As to the research of privately-run enterprises in the north field which is growing up in the limited space between the planned economy and market economy, scholars find this research will not only feature the development of private-enterprises and the behavior of the private-business owners, but also reflect the characteristics and defects of market development in the change of systems.The paper focuses on the research of the active behavior of the private business owners in the north. We try to explore the strategies and games of the private business owners in the transfer of social structure, so as to analyze and account for the change of social structure. We take the transition of economic system and social structure as the background, and start the analysis from the behavior of the private business owners in the perspective of the social guanxi network theory, and use local guanxi, renqing, face, etc as the tools of research.In the paper, we adopt the frame of "macro-to-micro". Firstly, we analyze the political, cultural and social constraints imposed on the private business owners' active selection from the macroscopical perspective, to show that the choice of guanxi network is the result of the agent's guanxi selection of strategies. Secondly, from the microcosmic perspective, we illustrate the point that guanxi network is the strategic instrument for the private business owner to achieve their objectives, and discuss in detail the cultivating of the guanxi network. Guanxi networks are dynamic structures which are not only endowed congenitally but also acquired later. The paper divides the guanxi networks cultivating into four phases: seek guanxi, weave guanxi, strengthen guanxi and develop guanxi. With the establishment and maintenance of the four steps, the private business enterprises completes the weave and cultivating from the "guanxi" to "guanxi networks" as well as the change from "means" to...