In April 2020, the Supreme People’s Court issued guidance on civil cases related to the epidemic. Where the epidemic or the measures against it only made a contract harder to perform, “the parties may renegotiate. Where performance can continue, the people’s courts shall strengthen mediation and actively guide the parties to continue performing.”
The same guidance said that courts would not support a request to end a contract only because performance had become difficult.
In Ming and Qing land sales, a seller could come back after the sale and ask the buyer for more money. The custom was called 找价, “seeking the price,” or 加找. A seller could claim that “the price was not enough.” The historian Cao Shuji found that after the Qianlong era, 加找 became a standard contract form.
A 2012 study in the law journal The Jurist cites the finding that repeated 找价, even after a deed of final sale, was “a very common custom.” Qing law later limited it. Where a deed of final sale did not mention extra payments, none were allowed.
On October 25, 1978, at a press conference in Tokyo, a Japanese reporter asked Deng Xiaoping about the Diaoyu Islands. Deng said that the two sides had set the question aside when they normalized relations. “It does not matter if such a question is set aside for a while, even for ten years.”
He added: “Our generation is not wise enough. Our next generation will surely be wiser than us. They will always find a good way, acceptable to all, to solve this question.”
On June 30, 2017, foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong: “As a historical document, it no longer has any practical significance. It is not binding in any way on the central government’s administration of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.”
A spokesperson of the British Foreign Office replied that the Declaration “remains as valid today as when it was signed over thirty years ago. It is a legally binding treaty, registered with the UN, and continues to be in force.”
In September 2017, Xu Hong, head of the Chinese foreign ministry’s department of treaty and law, said that China had never denied that the Declaration is an agreement.
On September 29, 1949, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference adopted the Common Program. Article 55 said: “The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China shall examine the treaties and agreements concluded between the Kuomintang government and foreign governments, and, according to their content, recognize, abolish, revise or renew them.”
In January 2019, a judge reviewed the book 情理法与中国人 (Feeling, Reason, Law and the Chinese) in a piece published by the Supreme People’s Court. She summed up the book’s view: “In the eyes of the Chinese, to accord with feeling comes first, to accord with reason second, and to accord with law third.”
She also defended the saying 法不容情, “the law makes no room for feeling.” It means, she wrote, that a judge must not bring private feeling into a case.
变通 To adapt. To act according to the actual situation, not bound by convention. The word is old. The Book of Changes says: “Nothing changes and gets through more than the four seasons.”
通融 To make an exception for someone. To stretch the rules as a favor.
合情合理 To accord with feeling and with reason. The everyday word for “reasonable.”
Su Weidao served several times as chief minister under Empress Wu Zetian. According to the Tang histories, he once said: “In handling affairs, one should not decide clearly. If there is an error, blame is sure to follow. It is enough to feel the edges and hold on to both ends.”
People called him “Su Moleng,” Su Who Feels the Edges. His words are the origin of the idiom 模棱两可, “feeling the edges, either way will do.” Dictionaries define it as taking no clear position.
The reformer Shang Yang asked the scholar Zhao Liang whether his rule of Qin was better than that of a famous earlier minister. Zhao answered: “The skins of a thousand sheep are not worth the fur under one fox’s leg. The yes, yes of a thousand men is not worth the frank objection of one gentleman.” (Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian)
The idiom 唯唯诺诺, to say yes to everything, goes back to the Han Feizi. It describes the people around a ruler who say “yes” before he has given an order and “certainly” before he has asked.
The Eastern Han scholar Sima Hui never spoke of other people’s faults. Whatever he heard, he answered “Good.” Asked how he was, he said “Good.” When a man told him that his son had died, he said “Very good.” His wife scolded him. Sima Hui replied: “What you say is also very good.”
The Ming writer Feng Menglong, who tells the story, says that the expression 好好先生, Mr. Good-Good, comes from it. Dictionaries define it as a person who does not ask what is right or wrong and only wants peace.