On the online marketplace Taobao, sellers chatting with buyers call them 亲, short for 亲爱的, “dear.” A typical line runs: 亲！包邮哦！记得给好评哦！ “Dear! Free shipping! Remember to leave a good review!”
The manner of speaking became known as 淘宝体, Taobao style, and was listed among the internet buzzwords of 2011. It spread beyond the site. Admission letters from some universities, traffic police safety slogans and a recruitment notice of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs used it, and some people objected.
套近乎 To pull nearness. To act close with someone one does not know well. The Handian dictionary notes that the word is usually critical.
套交情 To pull friendship. To draw someone into a relationship in order to grow closer.
门路 A doorway. Also the connections through which a person reaches a goal. In Dream of the Red Chamber, a dismissed official hears that old officials may be reappointed and goes everywhere “looking for relatives and doorways” (寻亲找门路).
熟主熟客 Familiar hosts and familiar guests. In a Ming story by Ling Mengchu, the merchants who have sailed overseas before “are all familiar hosts and familiar guests.” Only Wen Ruoxu knows no one.
欠情 To owe feeling. To have received a kindness and not yet repaid it. In The Plum in the Golden Vase, a man greets another: “I have owed you feeling for a long time and have not come to see you, brother.”
领情 To receive feeling. To accept a gift or a kindness and feel grateful for it.
回礼 To return a courtesy. To answer a gift or a greeting with one of one’s own.
雪中送炭 To send charcoal in the snow. To help someone in urgent need. A Ming story sets it against 锦上添花, adding flowers to brocade: “There is only adding flowers to brocade. Where is there sending charcoal in the snow?”
When Su Qin set out for Yan as a poor man, he borrowed a hundred coins. Years later he was chief minister of six states. The Records of the Grand Historian says that he repaid the lender with a hundred gold and “repaid everyone who had ever shown him kindness.”
One follower received nothing and came forward to ask. Su Qin said: “I have not forgotten you. When you came with me to Yan, you wanted to leave me again and again by the Yi River. At that time I was in trouble, so I resented you deeply. That is why I put you last. Now you will receive yours too.”
The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang did fieldwork in Xiajia, a village in Heilongjiang. As The Paper summarizes his finding, a gift “creates a spiritual bond between the giver and the receiver, which the villagers call renqing (人情).”
In the Ming story An Old Student Repays a Favor Over Three Generations (老门生三世报恩), the examiner Kuai prefers young candidates. Three times, without meaning to, he passes the same old man, Xianyu Tong. Xianyu passes the provincial examination at fifty-seven and the metropolitan examination at sixty-one.
Xianyu later clears Kuai’s son of a false charge. “This only repays a little of my teacher’s kindness,” he says. “I still owe much feeling.” He then keeps Kuai’s grandson at his official residence to study and gives him three hundred taels. Kuai thinks: “Plant thorns and get thorns. Plant peach and plum trees and get shade.”
“We used to think that ordering more dishes when treating guests gave us face. Now the waiters remind us to order moderately, and that is good. Now we take pride in a clean plate.” A diner named Yan said this in a Beijing restaurant in August 2020, during the Clean Plate campaign against food waste.
A People’s Daily commentary that September described the habit. Some people are frugal at other times, it said, but when they host, “even three or five people order a whole big table.” In some places, if the guests eat every dish, “the host feels he has no face.” Its headline gave the answer. Wasting food “is not having face, but losing face.”
On March 27, 2019, Xue Chunyan took delivery of a Mercedes-Benz CLS 300 from the Lizhixing dealership in Xi’an and found a problem with the engine. She negotiated with the dealer several times for an exchange or a refund, without success. On April 11, a video of her sitting on the hood of a car at the dealership, crying and complaining, began to spread online.
By April 17, the two sides had reached a settlement. On May 27, the market regulator fined the dealership one million yuan. Car owners in other cities copied her and sat on car hoods at their own dealerships.
The private talks had brought nothing for two weeks. The settlement came six days after the video appeared.
路遥知马力，日久见人心 A long road shows a horse’s strength. A long time shows a person’s heart. The saying appears in a Yuan play, The Fight to Repay Kindness (争报恩).
信用 Credit, trustworthiness. The Handian dictionary defines it as “the trust gained by keeping one’s promises.” Its example: “He is a person who keeps his word. Since he said he would help, he will surely help.”
In chapter 84 of Journey to the West, the widow Zhao, who has run an inn for many years, welcomes the pilgrims. “My inn treats guests in three ways,” she says. “Now let us be petty men first and gentlemen afterward. Let us settle the price of the room first, so the bill is easy later.”
The saying 先小人后君子, first the petty man, then the gentleman, means to set out the terms plainly before treating each other with courtesy. The writer Wang Meng explained it as signing a contract first, fixing the division of profit and responsibility, “and then talking of cooperation and team spirit.”