The Role of Guanxi in China’s Foreign Banks: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Guanxi has existed in China’s Confucian society for
more than two thousand years and at the end of the 1970s when
China opened its doors to the outside world, guanxi was
investigated in great detail. Current literature indicates that no
prior studies of guanxi have been investigated in China’s banking
industry, or in particular, the China’s foreign banks (“CFBs”).
This paper provides a theoretical review of the existing literature
on guanxi in general to facilitate development of the research
problem, gaps, questions and propositions/issues for further
investigation into a study on the role of guanxi in the CFBs.