Chinese business trust rests on personal relationships rather than contracts or law.

Evidence

The emergence of the greater China co-prosperity sphere was greatly facilitated by a “bamboo network” of family and personal relationships and a common culture. Overseas Chinese are much more able than either Westerners or Japanese to do business in China. In China trust and commitment depend on personal contacts, not contracts or laws and other legal documents. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 461

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s institutional economics reading (Milgrom on the law merchant, Shapiro on impersonal trust) — this is the culturally-embedded inverse: trust via kin networks instead of formal institutions.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘bamboo network’ concept — the overseas Chinese familial/commercial web spanning Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.