Guanxi is a Chinese word referring to a process of ‘drawing on connections in order to secure favors in personal relations and to fulfill personal objectives’ (Taormina et al., 2010: 1196) and it has long been considered a significant and indigenous part of Chinese culture (Yang, 1994; Bian, 1994). This paper examines what guanxi talk ‘means’ as a metapragmatic label (Silverstein,1976) to ‘millennial’ migrants in Beijing and their parents residing back in their place of origin, a small town in north region of China. Put differently, I focus on the social values that guanxi talk stereotypically indexes for them and how these indexical associations metonymically reproduce the social order.
The social processes of standardizing guanxi talk will be explored by collecting informants’ metalinguistic comments that typically imbue various categories of talk with value, social categorization and typification of personas (Jaworski et al., 2004; Agha, 2007). Thus, by accounting for generational differences and deconstructing the guanxi register as a ‘mysterious’ cultural form (Lee & Ellis, 1999; Chen &Chen, 2004), the paper aims to contribute to mapping out a process of language-ideological change. Data consists of twelve in-depth interviews, two focus group discussions, and two month worth of fieldwork notes.
The paper concludes that the guanxi register has been naturalized as the most effective way of tackling problems in China and mythologized as a form of talk owned and exemplified by the elder generation, which inevitably leads to ‘a circle of exclusion and intimidation’ (Cameron, 1995: 12). This is to say that the elder generation displays their privilege and intimidates young people through setting up a ‘standard’ of speaking the guanxi register, as well as keeping it mysterious and unlearnable. The younger generation re-appropriates the voices of exemplified guanxi register speakers and orients to a different ideological scheme to construct a new ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1998). Consequently, I argue that these cross-generational speakers display ‘competing valorizations’ (Agha, 2007: 157) of guanxi leading to social discord.