Chinese Left-Behind Children’s Perspectives on Ritual Practices: Navigating Guanxi, Renqing and Mianzi in School-Based Socialization

Current guanxi studies across fields such as education and business often frame guanxi (enduring social networks), renqing (reciprocal obligation), and mianzi (face work) as culturally embedded rituals that are enacted through practices aimed at accumulating social capital. However, limited research explores children's engagement with these social rituals. School and related interpersonal networks form key sites of children's socialization, where they begin to internalize these rituals through peer and teacher-student interactions. By adopting these rituals as the conceptual framework, this study draws on qualitative data from my PhD project on the agency of Chinese Left-behind Children (LBC) and provides in-depth thematic analysis. It challenges dominant deficit narratives that portray LBC primarily through their vulnerabilities by recognizing their ritual practices as an expression of relational agency. Findings show that participants strategically used guanxi and renqing to avoid teacher's penalties, forwent mianzi and offered renqing to prevent peer conflict, and protected others' mianzi while sacrificing their own. They also actively navigated the asymmetrical teacher-student power relations. These children demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of these rituals, similar to that of adults, reflecting their capacity for relational agency. Incorporating Chinese social rituals into this study also contributes to the ongoing efforts to decolonize childhood studies.