Guanxi as a gateway in Chinese‐Western business relationships

Purpose - This article aims to identify critical aspects of Chinese-Western intercultural guanxi relationships that have largely been ignored as a domain for study in international business and industrial marketing, and to suggest a way forward. Design/methodology/approach - A theme analysis across a range of academic and business journal articles is undertaken to capture major themes involving China-focused research that relates to international business and industrial marketing, and also to locate critical themes that may have been overlooked. Findings - Intercultural interaction at a personal level is both unavoidable and critical for successfully doing business with China. This study introduces the term guanxi gateway ties to highlight a special class of facilitating relationships that can emerge through interactions between guanxi insiders and guanxi outsiders. Insiders and outsiders can meet and work together in this middle-cultural territory for the instrumental purpose of obtaining passage through the "gateway". Research limitations/implications - Inevitably some journal articles of interest may have been missed in the review due to the chosen scanning boundary. Nevertheless the search method provides a sufficient base to reveal recurrent research themes, and also overlooked themes of potential significance. Practical implications - Guanxi gateway ties assist companies and individual business actors to find a path through the cumbersome Chinese bureaucracy and hierarchical levels by activating personal relationships. Originality/value - This study reveals a commonly overlooked perspective of guanxi, that is, as a facilitator of culture-bridging ties. The conventional business perspective of guanxi can be viewed as evolving from a gated community into an intercultural facilitating mechanism.