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“You Cannot Make Friends at Work”? Relatedness in and beyond the Workplace and the Reconfiguration of Kinship and Gender in Urban China

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the form of immersive research in corporate Shanghai, this article demonstrates how white-collar women in urban China crafted relatedness in the interstitial times and spaces of and beyond the workplace.

It brings to light how the precarious nature of work and the workplace environment shaped the precarious nature of relatedness established by those women who worked together.

Though aware of the assumed lack of sociability and interpersonal trust as well as the fleeting and momentary ties formed in urban and corporate spaces defined by mobility and instability, white-collar women who worked together developed ties of relatedness to express their own desired understanding of the self and familial and gender roles.

Forms of relatedness produced among white-collar women in and beyond the workplace occupy a space between home and work, reconceptualize women’s roles and places in family life, and reconfigure kinship and gender.

“It is so hard for a young woman to establish herself in a big city, away from her hometown. For common people like us, we can only rely on the care and help from our friends to make a living in Shanghai.” Sophia once quoted this line from Ode to Joy. #欢乐颂

The significance of kinship, on which extrafamilial relationships such as guanxi are based, has been declining in big cities, as more and more Chinese people, like my white-collar woman interlocutors in Shanghai, have moved from inland towns and cities to coastal metropolises where more interaction is among strangers rather than among kin and people from the same native place.

This article has demonstrated how non-kin relatedness produced by women who worked together reconfigured dominant kinship values, relations, and practices.

To cite this article: Peng, Xinyan. 2022. “‘You Cannot Make Friends at Work’? Relatedness in and beyond the Workplace and the Reconfiguration of Kinship and Gender in Urban China.” Modern China, June, 00977004221100151. https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221100151.