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Top1 Introduction
Influenced by the Confucian philosophy for more than two thousand years, China is often described as a relational society, where the cultural concept of “guanxi” (personal relationship or connections) has infiltrated into Chinese society, commerce, politics and other fields, and has great influence on people's behavior standards (Styles & Ambler, 2003; Wiegel & Bamford, 2014). China is the world's largest country with a population of 1.4 billion, including 570 million in agriculture (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2020). As the Chinese saying goes, “People regard food as their prime want”, the supply, production and circulation of agricultural products are related to the national economy, people's livelihood and social stability. China has the greatest variety, output and consumption of agricultural products in the world. Agricultural products are characterized by diversity, regionality and seasonality. There are many nodes and participants in the supply chain of agricultural products, and the enterprises engaged in agricultural production, operation and sales are mainly self-employed or small and micro enterprises. Wiegel & Bamford (2014) found that compared with large enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are more dependent on guanxi. Due to the lack of resources and government support, guanxi is very important in cultivating business relations, maintaining distribution channels, ensuring supply chain stability and enterprise production (Chu et al., 2021). The employees in each node of the agricultural supply chain have the characteristics of low academic qualifications and limited education level. Poor level of education is hindering their abilities to acquire and analyse knowledge, which makes them more dependent on guanxi. Guanxi networks also help increase farmers’ participation in modern high-value markets (such as supermarkets and international markets) (Lu et al., 2020). There is a growing research interest in guanxi marketing, which has been considered the Chinese version of relationship marketing (Shi et al., 2011). China's guanxi theory has existed in Confucianism for more than 2,000 years. In the social value system of Chinese guanxi culture, guanxi has been regarded as the key factor in China's commercial field (Kriz et al., 2014), and it has strong implications for interactions among individuals in Chinese society (Ko & Liu, 2017). Guanxi is the lifeblood of business activities in China, just as an old Chinese saying goes, “Doing business is all about building up guanxi.” Through the guanxi networks, enterprises can establish mutually beneficial relationships that are crucial to the success of enterprises (Chan, 2008), and this has an important impact on supply chain performance. The Chinese market has huge business potential, but its knowledge management still faces great obstacles. One of the reasons may be due to China's unique institutional rules and cultural factors (Liu et al., 2019). From the perspective of the upstream and downstream of the agricultural product supply chain, guanxi can reduce the conflict between farmers and enterprises, because the farmers will adopt different principles towards “their own people” and “outsiders”. As the cultural quality of agricultural employees is generally not high, they trust relatives, classmates and fellow villagers more, forming a closer relationship. In addition, the production of agricultural products in China has distinct regional characteristics, thus, it is a common phenomenon that fellow villagers are engaged in and control the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. Guanxi can deepen the stability of agricultural supply chain, so as to improve the competitiveness and performance of the supply chain.