32 Practices of Guanxi Production ryday Guanxi Proauction 33 capital and find a construction team, yet he would not directly call on respects. After he left, she said, "Secretary Feng is so good to me. Did em for labor. He purposely hired an out-of-village construction team you see that he called me great grandmother [laonainai l? to build his factory and paid them cash. Another woman who had just Recent Chinese films provide several more examples in which the opened a store told me it was wrong to ask friends for help in running emotional climax comes when one character acknowledges a relation a profit-making enterprise. However, she also said that her friends and ship by calling another by a relational kinship term. In the movie Old neighbors were her best customers. These two entrepreneurs both re Tales South of the City Wall(Cheng Nan Jiu Shi), a woman who thinks lied on friends, relatives, and fellow villagers in some aspects of thei she has found her abandoned daughter prepares to run away with her. businesses but avoided them as sources of labor. In contrast, the com- but just before they are about to go she realizes the young girl has not yet mercial vegetable gardener described above continued in 1992 to call addressed her. She says, "You still haven't called me, call me just once on the labor of his fellow villagers in exchange for shopping services (Ni hai mei jiao wo, jiao wo yi sheng). "The child calls her"Ma"and they In brief, the creation of ganqing through the exchange of favors should run off in a haze of rain and confusion, only to be run over by a train not be viewed as an unchanging essence of Chinese village life. Espe The stepson's use of"father"in Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou and the young cially over the past half century, the types and organization of labor in boy's use of maternal grand ather" in Sun Zhou's Heartstrings (xin Fengjia have been changing rapidly Xiang)provide equally compelling and perhaps better known examples e extended to everyone older, regard Kinship Terms and Names less of surname. Families of different surnames worked out generational Routine terms of address also constituted an everyday method of guanxi production. When I was in Fengjia, all older relatives were called by re Yangtze Plain village during the 193os and suggested that attached to ational kinship terms. This form of address was considered respect ach kinship relation is a certain attitude and level of respect that is and was an acknowledgment of the obligat on that junior people owed extended to each person addressed by a given kinship term. In Feng to their older relatives. Language learning itself started from kinship ia village, Fei's explanation also illuminates. When paying respects to terms. Small children were constantly being told"call that man shushu' one's older relatives on the Chinese New Year(by going to their houses, (father's younger brother)or"call her yi others sister)and re- addressing them by the appropriate kinship names, bowing, and wish warded if they managed to use the correct form of address. The term ing them well for the new year), " fictional"kin relations were given the (to recognize or acknowledge relatives) was closely related to same respect as"actual"ones. kinship terms. When a child began to call a friend of his father's"shu- Like many of the practices discussed in this book, Fengjia use of kin hu, "the child could be said to have"recognized"(ren)that man as a hip names echoes the Analects of Confucius, "Confucius says elative, In Fengjia, the title teacher (laoshi)was also used like a kin hip term. One man said, "Once they teach you, you call them la When names are not properly ordered. what is said is not attuned: when what for their whole life. "At times, children addressed their parent's teachers is said is not attuned, things will not be done successfully.( Book 13.3, cited in with the terms for paternal grandmother or grandfather(nainai, yeye Hall and Ames 1987:269) In some settings the use of a kinship term could be highly charged Usually referred to as the"rectification of names"(zheng ming). the spent the first day of the Chinese New Year with a woman who was old principle elaborated in this passage is interpreted by David Hall and both in terms of actual years and in terms of generations(the woman's Roger Ames as follows: "Acceptance of a name as appropriate involves a late husband had a generational name as old as or older than anyone disposition te act. Language is dispositional and the ordering of names lse living in the village). That morning the village secretary, who in age is per se an ordering of dispositions"(1987: 299). In brief, names do not was only twenty-five years younger than this woman but who belonged serve as "labels"for unitary, individual subjects; rather their usage im to the generation three levels below her, came and paid his customary plies a"disposition to act"that is appropriate to the guanxi that their