Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
111
At this point, we ought to take a
closer look at the text’s details
highlighting Asian peculiarities in contrast
with
Western
actuality’s
alleged
fundamental difference. In the first place,
in order to understand how and why the
government-sponsored
neighborhood
organizations work, we need to take into
account, as Read underscores, the specific
social representations and perceptions that
vary in relation to each society, but that
especially in Beijing and Taiwan’s case,
studied empirically by the author, show
many similarities as well as some
differences.
Read
observes
that
these
organizations have both critics and
advocates, but in general are appreciated
as well as supported, albeit mildly and
never enthusiastically. These stances stem
from a cultural ideal grounded in the
conception of a harmony and merging of
state and society that with good reason can
be called an
organic statism
. Those who
collaborate with these district and
neighborhood organizations are not overly
content, but they accept them and
cooperate with them for the sake of a
harmonious model of society. With these
organizations, the implicit paternalism is
not an obstacle in everyday life, though it
does not elicit any patent enthusiasm.
The
socio-structural
question
linked to the above involves the peculiarity
of relationships within and around the state
and
state-controlled
district
and
neighborhood organizations. In the first
place, Read points up that social relations
between the inner circle of staff members,
associates and ordinary neighborhood
residents are not typically horizontal. Most
times these asymmetries entail hierarchic
and clientelist power relations. In fact, the
leaders of the state and government-
controlled organizations enjoy a certain
amount of social prestige and charisma,
also because they are able to provide
important services to the individual
residents to which the latter respond with
counter-performances based on the
principle of
balanced reciprocity
, in
Marshall Sahlins’s terminology. The
resulting networks are characterized by
highly personalized relationship systems
that those Chinese concerned classify as
forms of
guanxi
based on favor exchanges.
The term
guanxi
immediately brings to
mind the Russian phenomenon known as
blat
, which Alena Ledeneva in her book on
this topic defined as
the economy of favors,
thereby giving the phenomenon a
systemic, hence nearly generalized
dimension. It is important to note that Reid
rightly warns us against emphasizing the
guanxi
element in the cases he studied
