An Emperor Who Stayed Away

The History of Ming records the late years of the Wanli Emperor. In the fourth month of 1612, the censors of Nanjing wrote to the throne: “The ministries are empty, and all affairs are in decay. The emperor has lived in seclusion for more than twenty years and has not once received his high officials.” The entry ends with two words: bu bao, “no reply.”

In 1619, as war in Liaodong went badly, the officials knelt at the palace gate and begged him to hold court and govern. Again the record says: “No reply.”

Late Means Death

In the seventh month of the first year of the Second Emperor of Qin, nine hundred conscripts were sent to garrison Yuyang. They camped at Dazexiang. The Records of the Grand Historian says: “It rained heavily, and the roads were impassable. They judged that they had already missed the deadline. For missing the deadline, the law was beheading for all.”

Chen Sheng and Wu Guang reasoned: “To flee now is death. To rise up is also death. Since death is the same, why not die for a state?” They killed the officers in charge and told the men: “You met the rain, and you have all missed the deadline. Missing the deadline means beheading.” The men followed them into revolt.

Qin legal texts excavated at Shuihudi set much lighter penalties for late labor service: a reprimand for three to five days, a fine for longer delays. In a 2014 article for The Paper, Guo Jian argued that Chen Sheng’s claim was most likely invented to rouse the men to revolt.

Forty-Three Hours

At 11 p.m. on November 13, 2015, crews in Beijing began to replace the Sanyuan Bridge. The old bridge, weighing 1,350 tonnes, was removed and replaced in one piece by a single machine that carries and lays bridge sections.

The work ended at 6 p.m. on November 15, after 43 hours. Reports said the workers had not closed their eyes for three days and two nights.

Ten Months for the Great Hall

Construction of the Great Hall of the People began in October 1958. It was one of the Ten Great Buildings in the capital for the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic, on October 1, 1959.

The hall was completed on September 24, 1959. The work took just over ten months, from the design drawings to the decoration and the installation and testing of all equipment. Accounts of the project mention the workers’ overtime and materials gathered from across the country.

Infrastructure Maniac

Jijian kuangmo (基建狂魔) means “infrastructure maniac.” In 2019, a China Daily series noted that China’s building record had earned it this name on the global construction market. It cited a question on the Q&A site Zhihu: “Why is China called an infrastructure maniac?”

One Zhihu comment read: “If China is not an infrastructure maniac, then perhaps there is no infrastructure maniac in the world.”

A Right to Be Offline

At the national Two Sessions in 2024, Lü Guoquan, a member of the national political advisory body and head of the general office of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, submitted a proposal on protecting workers’ lixian xiuxi quan, the right to offline rest. He suggested bringing it into law.

The proposal defined it as “the right of workers, outside statutory or agreed working hours, to refuse work contact or work matters through digital tools.” In December 2024, Xinhua reported that experts were divided. Shen Jianfeng supported the idea. Lou Yu said that overtime already requires agreement by both sides, so a new right was not needed.

No Read Mark

In August 2025, WeChat’s official account answered a user question: why is there no “read” function? Its reason was that a “read” mark “would increase the psychological burden and social pressure on the person who receives the message.”

Read and Unread

DingTalk, Alibaba’s app for workplace messaging, launched its version 1.0 on January 16, 2015. Among its first features were a company directory, yidu weidu (“read and unread”), DING messages, company groups and free calls.

As its name says, yidu weidu marks each message as read or unread for the person who sent it.

Three Minutes to Reply

In March 2023, the business paper IT Times reported on the rules for customer service on Taobao. Taobao, it wrote, assesses its merchants’ customer service by a reply time of three minutes. A merchant that misses it loses points in the year-end review. The paper added that Taobao has not published an official response time for its own customer service.

The agents call customers qin (亲) or qinqin, “dear.” A typical line quoted in the report is: “Dear, we will handle it as soon as possible.”

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