Gift-giving is a classic topic in anthropology, where on-going debates involve the principle of reciprocity, the spirit of the gift, and the relationship between gifts and commodities. In this study, the author examines the gift-giving and related social activities that pervade daily life in China, focusing on routine activities - visits between relatives, exchanges of food and labour between neighbours, gift-giving between friends - while not ignoring such special occasions as weddings and funerals. He constructs a classification of exchange behaviour in village society, examining the items of presentation, the types of gift-giving activities, and the hierarchical arrangement of givers and receivers. He also presents new interpretations of key concepts involved in Chinese gift-giving: guanxi (social networks), renqing (norms of interpersonal behaviour), mianzi (face), and bao (reciprocity). The book concludes by showing how the village gift economy has adjusted and survived in response to the radical social changes engendered by four decades of socialism.

Yunxiang Yan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Policy and Social Development, Fudan University, China. He is the author of Te Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (Stanford University Press, 1996), Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999 (Stanford University Press, 2003) and The Individualization of Chinese Society (Berg, 2009). His research interests include family and kinship, social change, the individual and individualization, and moral changes in post-Mao China.