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.
In the first story of Ling Mengchu’s collection Slapping the Table in Amazement, Chinese merchants reach a foreign port and are received by a Persian merchant. “By old custom, when a sea ship arrived, the host first gave this banquet, and only then were the goods unloaded and prices discussed.”
The host asks to see each guest’s list of goods, “so as to fix the seating.” Those with treasures worth ten thousand take the first seats, and the rest sit by the value of their goods, “regardless of age, regardless of rank.” Wen Ruoxu, who has silver but has bought no goods, is given the last seat, “his face full of shame.”
In January 2013, the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released its Blue Book of Social Mentality. Its survey of city residents found that fewer than half believed that most people in society can be trusted. Only 20 to 30 percent trusted strangers. More than 70 percent said they did not dare to trust strangers.