Bridging Relational Ontologies: Western Friendship and Chinese Guanxi in Dialogue

Abstract

International Relations scholarship treats friendship either as a metaphor applied to states or, when it reaches the level of individuals, as an instrument of power; in both cases, the concept loses the relational quality that defines it. This article addresses that deficit by bringing Western friendship theory into dialogue with Chinese guanxi scholarship. Van Hoef’s five-criteria model is theorized exclusively on Western premises and remains binary, describing friendship as a state that either exists or does not; guanxi, as theorized by Guo and by X.-P. Chen and C. C. Chen, is dimensional and processual from the outset. The synthesis produces four factors (affect, tangible effort, moral commitment, and net reciprocity) which situate friendship within a continuous relational spectrum, rather than in a category of its own. Relations occupy positions along that spectrum according to which factors are present and in what configuration, and they move back and forth across it as circumstances change; friendship is the fullest realization of the trajectory, a point at which all four factors hold at once. The framework is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. It does not stipulate how relations ought to be conducted but allows the mapping of an actor’s relational web and the tracking of a single relation over time, leaving whatever it registers as an empirical question rather than a theoretical one.