The changing Chinese culture and business behavior: The perspective of intertwinement between guanxi and corruption

Despite the enormous economic progress it has made over the past thirty years, China is increasingly demoralized, manifested in part in the intertwinement between guanxi and corruption. This change has fundamental repercussions on business culture, practices, and performance, and even more so in years ahead if corruption continues to be ubiquitous there. In this article I briefly explain why and how guanxi and corruption are intertwined, define the level of intertwineability that differs between weak form and strong form, and provide the taxonomy along the level of power abuse and the strength of intertwineability. This taxonomy can be used as a reference framework by future research within which to analyze the dynamics of guanxi-corruption interrelationships as well as organizational responses to such dynamics.