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delivery of around 45 days. Endysis could not do anything, such as transferring produc-
tion to another supplier; it was too late. The result was to wait for the Jiangsu supplier
to complete production of the requested order. The supplier compensated Endysis HZ
by paying the airfreight costs on behalf of the customer. According to the Operations
director, the reason for the late delivery was a much larger order placed by a Japanese
customer who had a long-term relationship with the supplier. The Japanese customer’s
order required almost the whole capacity of the supplier to be used for its production.
As a result, the Jiansu supplier postponed the production plan of Endysis HZ, and pro-
vided its manufacturing services to a customer whose relationship resources with the
Jiansu supplier were more developed. In this way, the Jiansu supplier showed commit-
ment to its relationship with the Japanese company. Here, it could be concluded that
contract specifications within supplier relationships in China are not often seen as an
obligation, from the Chinese business actors’ point of view.
5.6 Conclusion
The ten product development networks examined in this multiple case study re-
search are embedded on specific sets of interpersonal business relationships. Find-
ings show that in Chinese business networks, interpersonal relationships may prove
superior to Western-based networks, not only in terms of measureable aspects,
such as quality, access to information and payment terms, but also in terms of non-
measurable, intangible aspects, such as conflict resolution and mobilisation of ac-
tors. Findings show that the power of interpersonal relationships in China enables
the utilization of key relationship patterns, mobilisation of key individual business
actors and access to key resources in other networks. However, as China is ’a matrix-
civilisation of paradoxical cultural development’ (Faure & Fang 2008: 206) and Chi-
nese actors continuously interact within systems that increasingly manifest Western
ways of acting, due to the nowadays global presence of Western social and busi-
ness systems, the interpersonal or, metaphorically put it, guanxi interaction process
should be thus taken as something trivial.
Multiple case studies have shown that guanxi can be seen as a process that evolves
through time and depends on the interplay between business and non-business in-
teraction. Although it should be acknowledged that ‘business interaction’ and ‘non-
business interaction’ may be narrow Western formulations, this research makes
clear that business and non-business interaction are all related to business when
doing business in China. According to the Yin Yang philosophy, opposites are em-
braced and they co-exist in each other. Interpersonal non-business interaction is
