吃苦耐劳 To eat bitterness and endure toil. To bear a hard life and stand up to heavy work.
任劳任怨 To take on toil and take on complaints. The Handian dictionary explains: to work without shirking hardship and without fearing the complaints of others. The phrase goes back to Han dynasty texts.
At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the hurdler Liu Xiang withdrew injured from the first heat. On August 7, 2012, at the London Olympics, he fell at the first hurdle of his 110 meters heat. He hopped on one foot to the end of the track and kissed the last hurdle.
Sina wrote that television viewers around the world saw “the moving scene of him hopping the whole track on one leg and kissing the hurdle goodbye.”
Lu Yao spent six years on his novel Ordinary World. While writing, he sat at his desk fifteen or sixteen hours a day. In 1991, the novel won the Mao Dun Literature Prize. On November 17, 1992, Lu Yao died in Xi’an at the age of 42.
One tribute to him reads: “He fought stubbornly against illness and wrote without sparing his life.”
In his New Year address for 2017, Xi Jinping called on the country to luqi xiuzi jiayou gan, “roll up our sleeves and work hard.” In his New Year address for 2018, he said: xingfu dou shi fendou chulai de. “Happiness is all won by striving.”
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Zhou Yu has the general Huang Gai beaten so that Cao Cao will believe Huang Gai’s false offer to defect. The trick is called kurouji, the ruse of the suffering body.
A common saying comes from the story: Zhou Yu da Huang Gai, yi ge yuan da, yi ge yuan ai. “Zhou Yu beats Huang Gai. One is willing to beat, and one is willing to be beaten.”
In March 2019, Chinese programmers started a project on GitHub called 996.ICU. Its slogan was gongzuo 996, shengbing ICU: “Work 996, get sick, end up in the ICU.” 996 means working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.
Within weeks, the page had almost 200,000 stars. Its list of companies said to demand such hours had grown to 123.
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.”
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.”
Article 35 of the Civil Servant Law says that civil servants shall be assessed comprehensively on their 德、能、勤、绩、廉: virtue, ability, diligence, results and integrity. The emphasis is on political quality and actual work results.
Diligence is assessed as a criterion of its own, next to results.
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.”