Neighborhoods, Social Networks, and Trust in Post-Reform China: The Case of Guangzhou

Urban scholars in the West pay considerable attention to the neighborhood as a locus for social networks. Such an emphasis would be appropriate in China as well. Here work-units were the urban building blocks until the late 1970s, and social networks mainly developed within their boundaries. But economic reforms have generated a new urban structure, eroding the centrality of the work-unit as a site of social organization. There has been little empirical research on the impacts of this transition for social networks. This study takes up that task with an exploratory investigation into the role of the neighborhood for social networks in Guangzhou. Results from a survey and interviews indicate that people maintain strong ties with former neighbors and with contacts based on kinship, region, and work. However, due to high residential mobility, in post-reform China many of these contacts do not reside within the neighborhood any more. At the metropolitan scale, this causes new problems: neighborhoods consist of strangers who do not readily trust each other.