Abstract:

This study investigates the emergence of meritocratic professionalism among Chinese musicians in Germany. The Chinese and German societies differ in terms of both culture and institutions, which results in differences in the meaning, construction, and social consequences of interpersonal relationships. In Chinese Society, the guanxi-oriented concept is one of the most important guiding principles for handling all aspects of social life. The organizational structure of Chinese society is characterized by the chaxugeju, in which people distinguish insiders from outsiders in a self-centered, gradational way. In such a system, guanxi are often built on (quasi-)ascribed ties such as kinship. In contrast, the German classical music field exhibits a typical community-oriented logic of relationship building, which emphasizes achieved community formation based on individual interests or affinities. In the German classical music field, the general trajectory of professional socialization leads musicians to gradually internalize the significance of both social relationships and professional skills, fostering an integrated professionalism that values both dimensions. However, influenced by the guanxi ethic embedded in the chaxugeju pattern, Chinese musicians often cannot fully perceive and understand the local logic of social embeddedness grounded in professional communities, resulting in an overwhelming emphasis on skill embeddedness and the development of meritocratic professionalism. By displaying the concrete process through how new professional values emerge among Chinese migrants, this study moves a step forward from prevailing accounts that conceptualize cross-cultural adaptation as a process of selectively adopting or combining pre-existing cultures. It demonstrates that such new values may not derive directly from the migrants' culture of origin nor fully align with the host culture, but instead take shape as novel cultural forms constructed through the tensions between the two which shaped by the interplay of multiple dimensions of embeddedness.

Key words: guanxi ethics, chaxugeju, meritocracy, professionalism, embeddedness