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.