There's nothing uniquely Chinese about the notion that having strong relationships with the right people can make your life easier.
Having a good relationship is important. Giving a token of appreciation is accepted and often expected?
Consider a student who studies abroad and gives such a token to his professor. Totally unaware that a few days later he gets dismissed from the university for bribing. (Or involves a lot of back and forth between the universities to explain the behaviour. This is something we have seen many times)
Now let's look at the foreign manager working in China. Building relationships by exchange of a businesscard is normal. A small gift, like a pen is accepted. But he doesn't know how to respond to a situation when some rituals are involved; such as paying for a dinner. But often relationships extend beyond a business situation and people can ask you for a small 'favour' that is unrelated to business... but can put someone in a very awkward position, as it does influence further business (and often complicates it). Managers who go abroad are sometimes even warned about this when going here. Note: which I believe is also bad as it creates a stigma and prevents from understanding it. Maybe after a few months he understands more of it, but he will likely ignore the reasoning or the actual intent. But again, this is not specific to China (happens in most Asian countries and the West or anywhere else in some form or way).
It also work at a much lower level: if you have good "guanxi" with the boss of the abr in front of your door and often brings friends, he will be nice and, say, call you if the cops are coming when your car is not correctly parked.
Also, if you build your own house, some neighbourghs might play it nice and allow you to use a bit of the public road to stock piles of brick or whatever.
All of these mean we are not wild beast living in the forest, neither are we cowboys, we have a to live in a society and having good relationships with anyone around you (upwards, downwards and at the same level) is very desirable.
In Germany we have "Vitamin B", i.e. beneficial relationships. In America, on the other hand, they have this strange concept of meritocracy.
American is the land of legal lobbying. I'd say this is pretty close to that concept too.
I can definitely understand ladder-climbing in the workplace but there are countless instances of people acting without dignity or restraint. It's downright unsightly.
Thus proving gbraad's point?
Guanxi is not those things you mentioned. Incidentally, it's not something that is difficult for foreigners to grok - they just need to have some exposure and experience with it.
Maybe it's by taking people out to dinner and getting drunk with them, building up a certain type of camaraderie.
Othertimes it's outright bribery.
But this sort of thing:
> boot-licking, toady, lackey, stooge, sycophantic, brown-nose.
Rarely works to develop good guanxi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_charact...
"When in Rome" and "know thy enemy" makes sense but the tasteless passion that people have for blatant cronyism is quite unpleasant.
This may also be of interest: