Last week I had coffee with my friend Marc, a Newcastle graduate who has studied Chinese in Shanghai for a year. Now back in England with fluent Chinese (sort of), he’s working on his fledging but ambitious business plan – selling Macbook Air (the thinnest laptop ever made, I think) worldwide.

When he was in China, he somehow established connection with a Macbook Air manufacturer, who’s willing to sell laptops to him at a low price of GBP600 (usually they are more than a grand). He told me now he’s going to resell them for more, making a pure profit of GBP100 for each sell.

Connection/relationship/networking is the English equivalent of the Chinese word ‘guanxi‘. It can be such a powerful act in China (and now obviously worldwide too) that the term itself is recorded by Wikipedia. Well, I guess we can’t really be blamed for taking advantage of people relationships, after all we have 1.3 billion people, what do you expect?

Anyway, back to Marc’s story. He’s already been approached by a buyer who claims will buy 20 laptops off him monthly. Interestingly, this buyer is himself based in China, but Marc’s price is the cheapest he can get hold of. So he has to wait for Marc to import the laptops from China to England first, and then to export them back to China again ! Well, without ‘guanxi‘, that’s how long you have to wait I’m afraid.

After listening to Marc’s glorious victory, I feel pretty limp about my own connections, which only allow me to toil at 10 quid an hour to teach Chinese to my boyfriend’s flatmate’s girlfriend’s boss’s son. Sixty nine more hours to go if I’m to buy a Macbook Air off Marc.

You may have come to the conclusion that it’s not only WHAT you know (Chinese in both cases), but also WHO you know. However, using ‘guanxi‘ is not shameful at all. Haven’t you noticed that ‘networking’ is what people are looking for nowadays on facebook, apart from ‘dating’ and ‘friendship’? ‘Guanxi‘ is simply the less intimidating and more plain version of the dazzling term ‘PR’.

Worry not if you feel you haven’t got the ‘guanxi‘ or network or whatever factor. The connections are provided for you. Visit Careers Service’s North East Graduate Directory or Graduate Connections for contacts database. You can either directly contact previous graduates or the employers you want to work for in the North East.

So now you’ve got them both, the ‘What You Know’ (hopefully) factor, and sometimes (and only sometimes) more importantly, the ‘Who You Know’ factor!