The Three Character Classic, a traditional primer for children, holds up students who drove themselves. “One tied his hair to the beam. One jabbed his thigh with an awl. No one made them. They drove themselves to hard study.”
“One read by fireflies in a bag. One read by the light of snow. Their families were poor, but they never stopped learning.” The four students were Sun Jing, Su Qin, Che Yin and Sun Kang.
勤能补拙 Diligence can make up for clumsiness.
笨鸟先飞 The clumsy bird flies first. The less able start early so as not to fall behind. Also said of oneself, as a modest phrase.
只要功夫深，铁杵磨成针 With enough work, an iron rod can be ground into a needle. A Song geography tells how the young Li Bai gave up his studies, met an old woman grinding an iron rod into a needle, and went back to finish.
天道酬勤 Heaven rewards diligence.
After his defeat by Wu, King Goujian of Yue returned to his state. “He toiled in body and burned in thought. He set a gall bladder by his seat. Sitting or lying down, he looked up at it, and when he ate or drank, he tasted it.” (Records of the Grand Historian)
The Records say nothing about sleeping on brushwood. The two first appear together as wo xin chang dan, sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall, in a piece by the Song writer Su Shi. The idiom describes driving oneself through hardship to grow strong, without forgetting a humiliation.
During the May Day holiday of 2015, CCTV first broadcast the series Da guo gongjiang, Great Craftsmen of the Nation. In March 2016, Premier Li Keqiang’s Government Work Report used the term gongjiang jingshen, craftsman spirit, for the first time.
One worker the media call a great craftsman is Gao Fenglin, who had worked as an aerospace welder for 35 years by 2015. He calls his job “welding the heart of the rocket.” People’s Daily wrote that he can watch a tiny weld seam for ten minutes without blinking.
At Huawei, the mattress became a symbol. A company text from 2006, titled Heaven Rewards Diligence, describes the origin of Huawei’s chuangdian wenhua, mattress culture. In the words of the business site Jiemian, the mattress stands for “a culture of continuous striving.” Ren Zhengfei once said: “Huawei has no money. If people do not strive, it will collapse. We cannot pay anything for those who do not strive.”
In 2008, Ren played the symbol down. “The mattress is not a culture. Culture can be passed on. A mattress is only a tool for an afternoon nap.”
In Linchuan, a pond was said to be the ink pond of the calligrapher Wang Xizhi. The Song writer Zeng Gong recorded the legend in his Record of the Ink Pond: “Xizhi admired Zhang Zhi and practiced calligraphy by the pond until its water turned black.” He asked: “Is this really so?”
Zeng Gong was sure of one thing. “Xizhi’s calligraphy became good only late in life. What he could do, he reached through his own effort. It was not a gift of nature.”
On April 17, 2021, a post titled Lying Flat Is Justice appeared on the forum Baidu Tieba, written by a user called “the good-hearted traveler.” Tangping, lying flat, came to mean withdrawing from fierce competition and no longer striving. It made the lists of the top words of 2021.
In May 2021, Southern Daily answered with a commentary titled “Lying Flat Is Shameful. Where Is the Justice in It?” Xinhua reprinted it.
没有功劳也有苦劳 Even without merit, there is hard toil.
吃得苦中苦，方为人上人 Only by eating the bitterest of bitterness can one rise above others.
In 1984, Hu Yaobang extended the first saying when he praised an old Red Army veteran: “If not merit, then toil. If not toil, then fatigue.”
On April 12, 2019, Jack Ma told an internal Alibaba event that being able to work “996,” from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, was “a huge blessing.” For companies like Alibaba, he said, it was a fubao (福报), a reward earned by good deeds.
Ma later wrote on Weibo that no company should or could force employees to work 996. In August 2021, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the Supreme People’s Court published model labor cases against unlawful overtime rules.
In March 1960, the oil driller Wang Jinxi led his team from Yumen to the new Daqing oilfield. They moved and installed the drilling rig by pulling with their hands and carrying on their shoulders. During a blowout, Wang jumped into the mud pit and stirred the mud with his body. He became known as the “Iron Man.”
At a rally on April 29, 1960, he shouted: “Better to live twenty years less, but we must take this great oilfield, whatever it costs.”