The capability of personal values and guanxi to reduce negative external effects of Chinese agriculture

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of agricultural products, but the intensive agriculture contributes in a remarkable manner to environmental problems. Since environmental protection has recently become a popular issue in China, the government attaches great importance to the formulation of laws and regulations. Accordingly, China faces serious challenges inter alia in the accomplishment of effective agricultural trainings, environmentally sensitive farming and especially in the farmers’ willingness to adopt optimized farming approaches. In order to promote a sustainable adaption of reduced input techniques, farmers’ behaviour and their production decisions are crucial. Based on a social-psychological approach of individual behaviour, this contribution likes to close a considerable gap in analysing the Chinese farmers’ personal value positions and their social fallback system, namely personal relationship networks called guānxi. Next to the theoretical framework, this paper reports key results from a farmer survey in two intensive agricultural counties of Shandong Province on the capability of guānxi and personal values to reduce negative effects of agricultural inputs.