人走茶凉 When the guest leaves, the tea goes cold. When an official leaves a high post, people turn cold toward him, because he can no longer grant them favors.
In August 2015, a People’s Daily commentary called the saying a vivid image of how warm and cold human relations can turn. It told retired officials to accept the cold tea and not interfere in the work of their successors.
The saying is about ties that rested on the post and not on the person.
At the time of Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s PC business, its founder Liu Chuanzhi handed the chairmanship to Yang Yuanqing, his longtime protégé. In 2009, with Lenovo in losses, Liu returned as chairman, and Yang became CEO.
“In this situation, I had no choice but to go back as chairman,” Liu said later. “Yang Yuanqing changed from chairman to CEO.”
In a 1988 survey in Tianjin, the sociologist Bian Yanjie found that jobs were obtained through strong ties more often than through weak ties. Job seekers often reached their helpers through an intermediary to whom both sides had strong ties, and those who used such indirect ties got better jobs. He published the study in 1997 in the American Sociological Review as “Bringing Strong Ties Back In.”
一日为师，终身为父 Teacher for a day, father for life. An old saying: whoever was one’s master even for a day deserves lifelong respect as a father. It appears in a Yuan play by Guan Hanqing.
老乡 A person from the same home region.
战友 A comrade-in-arms. Someone who fought side by side with one.
Under the Tang imperial examinations, a successful candidate regarded the chief examiner who passed him as his zuozhu, his patron, and himself as the examiner’s mensheng, his disciple. In the words of the literary historian Hu Kexian, “the patron regarded his disciples as his ‘estate fields,’ and the disciples regarded their patron as the ‘owner of the garden.'”
Candidates who had failed many times felt especially grateful once they passed. After the examiner Gao Ying died, Bai Juyi passed his old house and still wrote a poem of gratitude.
In 223, the dying Liu Bei, ruler of Shu Han, called his chancellor Zhuge Liang and entrusted his son to him. “Your talent is ten times that of Cao Pi,” he said. “If my heir can be helped, help him. If he has no talent, you may take the throne yourself.”
Zhuge Liang wept: “I will give all the strength of my limbs and the loyalty of my heart, until death.” Liu Bei told his sons to serve the chancellor “as a father.”
In the 1980s, people from Wenzhou in Zhejiang settled in Beijing’s Fengtai District to trade. Their district became known as “Zhejiang Village.” The anthropologist Xiang Biao studied it. When people there needed workers in 1984, he writes, they wrote home or even went back in person, to mobilize relatives and find suitable girls through kin networks and in their own and nearby villages. “This was common in Zhejiang Village.”
“Our own people,” he notes, meant “direct relatives or good friends, who would speak up for one when needed.” By 1987, newcomers no longer needed a tie to someone already there. He counts 96,000 outsiders in the area beside 14,000 Beijing natives.
In Ming and Qing cities, people from the same home region built guild halls, huiguan. The earliest one known is the Wuhu Guild Hall in Beijing, built in the Yongle era of the Ming. At first the halls gave fellow natives a place to meet, to enjoy themselves and to stay the night. Some later became associations of merchants in the same trade.
Every year, in about forty days around the Spring Festival, hundreds of millions of people cross the country. The rush is called chunyun. It grows out of the custom of reuniting with family for the festival. Even people who work far from home try to be back before New Year’s Eve.
The word first appeared in People’s Daily and Xinhua reports in 1980. For the 2026 rush, 9.4 billion cross-region trips were expected, a new record.