In the Water Margin, the fugitive Lin Chong comes to the outlaws of Liangshan and asks to join them. The innkeeper Zhu Gui tells him what is required. He must go down the mountain, kill a man and bring back his head, and then the chief will have no doubts about him. “This is called the toumingzhuang” (投名状), the pledge that enters one’s name.
The chief, Wang Lun, gives Lin Chong three days to bring one.
The Communist Party’s Regulations on Disciplinary Action name hometown, alumni and comrades-in-arms associations, among others. The provision reads: “Party members who are leading cadres and who, in violation of the relevant rules, organize or take part in spontaneously formed hometown associations, alumni associations, comrades-in-arms associations and the like shall, where the circumstances are serious, be given a warning, a serious warning or removal from Party posts.”
The provision was Article 68 in the 2015 version of the regulations, Article 74 in 2018 and Article 82 in 2023.
On February 15, 1945, Mao Zedong spoke about shantou zhuyi (山头主义), “mountaintop-ism,” in which each group in the Party holds to its own hill. He did not deny that such groups existed. “Acknowledging that mountaintop-ism exists,” he said, “has the purpose of eliminating the mountaintops, so that they melt together and the whole Party becomes one body.”
In November 2016, the Communist Party published its Several Norms on Political Life Within the Party under the New Situation. One rule reads: “No one may treat the Party’s cadres as private property. Personal dependency relations are not allowed in the Party.” Another forbids members, above all senior cadres, to form “small mountaintops, small circles and small gangs,” to build private relationships or to cultivate personal power.
An article published in May 2017 quoted Xi Jinping on what he called the “circle culture” of some cadres. They spend all day pulling connections, he said, “analyzing whose person someone is and who promoted him,” and looking for “whose thigh they can hug.”
In 2000, the researchers Chow, Deng and Ho published a survey of 142 managers on how openly knowledge is shared inside organizations. They reported in the Journal of Management Accounting Research that managers in China “shared knowledge significantly less with a potential recipient who was not a member of their ingroup.”
The psychologist Hwang Kwang-kuo built a model of how Chinese people decide on a request. Starting from Fei Xiaotong’s idea of ties that are closer or more distant, he divides relationships into three kinds: expressive, mixed and instrumental.
Each kind follows its own rule. For expressive ties, the rule of need applies. For instrumental ties, the rule of fairness applies. For mixed ties, the person who controls the resource follows the rule of renqing (人情). He weighs what helping would cost against the return that may come in the future.
In a 1988 survey in Tianjin, the sociologist Bian Yanjie found that jobs were obtained through strong ties more often than through weak ties. Job seekers often reached their helpers through an intermediary to whom both sides had strong ties, and those who used such indirect ties got better jobs. He published the study in 1997 in the American Sociological Review as “Bringing Strong Ties Back In.”
In Rural China (乡土中国), the sociologist Fei Xiaotong describes rural society as a society of people who know one another. There, he writes, “trust does not rest on respect for contracts.” It comes from “the reliability of knowing the rules of conduct so well that one acts without thinking.”
Acquaintances, he notes, say: “We are all acquaintances. A greeting is enough, why say more?” In modern society people fear that “the spoken word is no proof,” so “they make a mark and sign their names. Only then does law begin.”
In 1947, the sociologist Fei Xiaotong published a series of essays on rural society, collected in 1948 as Rural China (乡土中国). In them he named the pattern of Chinese social relations chaxu geju (差序格局), the differential mode of association.
“Our pattern,” he wrote, is like “the ripples that spread out in circles when a stone is thrown onto the water. Each person is the center of the circles pushed out by his own social influence.”
自己人 Our own people, those close to us.
胳膊肘往外拐 The elbow bends outward. Said of someone who helps outsiders against their own people.
肥水不流外人田 Rich water does not flow into an outsider’s field. Keep the good things within the family.