Particularism and the Chinese social fabric

Abstract

In the new approaches to understanding Chinese development, clientelism and particularism have become increasingly important elements of analysis. The article discusses the community-orientated particularistic principle of tong in contrast to the universalistic principle of gong, and applies this to the particularistic social reality of works units (danwei), connection building (guanxi) and surveillance through files (dang'an) to show how the particularistic core of Chinese society dominates modern China. It is important to understand that even if such particularism has roots in the old society, the structures are recreated in the modern society in ways that cannot be linked to history as such.