熟人 An acquaintance, a person one knows well. Its opposite is 生人, a stranger, literally a “raw person.”
靠谱 Reliable, trustworthy. Said of a person who does things in a sensible way.
拉关系 To pull connections. To make friends with someone one barely knows, for a purpose.
走后门 To go through the back door. To get things done through improper private connections.
在家靠父母，出门靠朋友 At home, rely on parents. Away from home, rely on friends.
Article 533 of China’s Civil Code covers a contract whose basic conditions change in a major way that the parties could not foresee and that is not a commercial risk. If continued performance would be clearly unfair to one party, “the party adversely affected may renegotiate with the other party.” Only if they fail to agree within a reasonable time may either party ask a court or an arbitration body to change or end the contract.
In one reported case, a court refused a request for higher rent based on rising prices.
In April 2020, the Supreme People’s Court issued guidance on civil cases related to the epidemic. Where the epidemic or the measures against it only made a contract harder to perform, “the parties may renegotiate. Where performance can continue, the people’s courts shall strengthen mediation and actively guide the parties to continue performing.”
The same guidance said that courts would not support a request to end a contract only because performance had become difficult.
In Ming and Qing land sales, a seller could come back after the sale and ask the buyer for more money. The custom was called 找价, “seeking the price,” or 加找. A seller could claim that “the price was not enough.” The historian Cao Shuji found that after the Qianlong era, 加找 became a standard contract form.
A 2012 study in the law journal The Jurist cites the finding that repeated 找价, even after a deed of final sale, was “a very common custom.” Qing law later limited it. Where a deed of final sale did not mention extra payments, none were allowed.
On October 25, 1978, at a press conference in Tokyo, a Japanese reporter asked Deng Xiaoping about the Diaoyu Islands. Deng said that the two sides had set the question aside when they normalized relations. “It does not matter if such a question is set aside for a while, even for ten years.”
He added: “Our generation is not wise enough. Our next generation will surely be wiser than us. They will always find a good way, acceptable to all, to solve this question.”
On June 30, 2017, foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong: “As a historical document, it no longer has any practical significance. It is not binding in any way on the central government’s administration of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.”
A spokesperson of the British Foreign Office replied that the Declaration “remains as valid today as when it was signed over thirty years ago. It is a legally binding treaty, registered with the UN, and continues to be in force.”
In September 2017, Xu Hong, head of the Chinese foreign ministry’s department of treaty and law, said that China had never denied that the Declaration is an agreement.
In January 2019, a judge reviewed the book 情理法与中国人 (Feeling, Reason, Law and the Chinese) in a piece published by the Supreme People’s Court. She summed up the book’s view: “In the eyes of the Chinese, to accord with feeling comes first, to accord with reason second, and to accord with law third.”
She also defended the saying 法不容情, “the law makes no room for feeling.” It means, she wrote, that a judge must not bring private feeling into a case.
变通 To adapt. To act according to the actual situation, not bound by convention. The word is old. The Book of Changes says: “Nothing changes and gets through more than the four seasons.”
通融 To make an exception for someone. To stretch the rules as a favor.
合情合理 To accord with feeling and with reason. The everyday word for “reasonable.”
再说 Let’s talk about it later. Literally “speak again.” Used to put a decision off.
从长计议 To plan for the long term. Not to decide now.
好说 Easy to discuss. A modest, polite phrase. It can also mean “that can be arranged.”
推三阻四 To push three and block four. To give one excuse after another.
敷衍 To deal with something only on the surface.
给台阶下 To give someone steps to come down. To offer a way out of an awkward position.
不了了之 To settle a matter by not settling it. To leave it unfinished, let it drag on, and count it as done.
冷处理 Cold treatment. To leave a matter untouched for now and settle it at a better moment.
推托 To decline with an excuse.
婉拒 To refuse gently.