“At home you rely on your family, outside you rely on friends”, people often say in central China. Yet family and friendship do not have to be opposed to each other: good friends do in fact call each other brothers and sisters. The relationship between teacher and student, and that between master and apprentice, are similarly modeled on the relationships within a family. Such relationships of ‘fictive’ kinship are crucially important for social support in times of hardship and insecurity, and also for local business and politics. This project is an ethnographic study of social support through relationships with brothers, friends, masters, and teachers in contemporary rural China.

The project builds upon my PhD research, which included 18 months of participant observation in several villages of Enshi Prefecture, Hubei Province. I will return to these villages for further fieldwork, focusing on the social support networks of local farmers, businessmen, and craftsmen.

Together with kinship relations broadly, the relationships with friends, masters, and teachers have undergone huge transformations: Since the introduction of family planning, most families have only one or two children. Whilst the importance of the extended family has declined, the relationship between affinal cousins (also called “brothers”, biaoxiong) for instance remains very important in local society. With increased spatial mobility, labour migration, and local commercial activity the importance of friendship has increased widely. Friends – who are often from the same place of origin (laoxiang), classmates (tongxue), or colleagues (tongshi) – provide the most important personal ties people have outside their families and their kin.

The relationships of master-apprentice and teacher-student have a long tradition in rural China, but have also seen broad changes in recent decades. Builders, carpenters, geomancers, and cooks generally learn their trade with a master, and so do now electricians and other skilled workers. With extended schooling, the number of teachers has increased concomitantly. The relationships between teacher and student, and master and apprentice often last for their lifetimes, and masters and teachers are often nodal points of personal networks in local communities.

In all these relationships mutual support and protection are expected. They are characterized by emotional attachment, but also have their instrumental dimensions. In these relationships, locally specific notions of reciprocity, morality, and subjectivity are realized. Such relationships are then also highly relevant for local business and government. Altogether, they provide a privileged entry point to investigate changing notions of reciprocity, community, and the state in post-socialist China.