Chapter 71 of the Water Margin is titled “In the Hall of Loyalty, a stone tablet receives a text from Heaven. The heroes of Liangshan take their places in order.” The tablet sets out the names of the 108 heroes.
The text reads: “Now the number is complete. Heaven has fixed the places in two grades, large and small. The tiangang and disha stars have all been given their order.” Song Jiang stands first.
Many Chinese graduate students call their supervisor laoban, boss. In an essay, the philosopher Zhou Guoping called this “a fairly common phenomenon” in Chinese universities. A supervisor becomes a boss, he wrote, “first through the power to decide whether a student can graduate, and second through the funds in his hands.”
In June 2026, the Beijing News reported a survey in which more than half of the respondents wanted their supervisors to be more like supporters than traditional bosses.
On October 24, 2020, Jack Ma spoke at the second Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai. He criticized the way finance was regulated. “Good innovation is not afraid of regulation,” he said, “but it is afraid of yesterday’s regulation.”
On November 2, the central bank and three other financial regulators held a regulatory interview with Ma and with Ant Group’s chairman and president. On the evening of November 3, Ant Group’s listing on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, planned for November 5, was put on hold.
In official lists, the ordinary members of the Politburo appear in the order of the number of strokes in their surnames. The members of its Standing Committee do not. Their order, Southern Weekend wrote in 2013, is tied to “their division of work and their seniority in the Party.”
The paper added: “Although the ranking of leaders carries important political information, there is no written rule for it.”
In 2014, a Beijing official explained to the Beijing News how deputies are addressed. “Nobody says Deputy Director X. Deputy leaders are mostly called by surname plus a short form of the title.” The word fu, deputy, is left out.
A professor warned about one short form, the surname plus fu. For deputies named Zu or Yue, it gives Zu fu or Yue fu, which sound like the words for grandfather and father-in-law.
In 202 BC, defeated by Liu Bang, Xiang Yu reached the Wu River. On the other side lay Jiangdong, where he had raised his army. He refused to cross.
“I crossed the river and went west with eight thousand young men of Jiangdong. Today not one of them returns. Even if the fathers and elder brothers of Jiangdong pitied me and made me king, with what face could I see them? Even if they said nothing, would I not be ashamed in my heart?”
He died there by his own hand. (Records of the Grand Historian)
In 2006, sex workers and their clients were paraded through the streets in Shenzhen, and the clients’ heads were shaved. In July 2010, police in Dongguan led sex workers on a rope while local television filmed them. In Wuhan, the names of suspects were posted in the street, and the police later admitted that this was “indeed improper.”
Later that month, the Ministry of Public Security ordered the police to stop parading suspects in public. A ban on such parades had already been issued in 1988.
In November 2018, Dolce & Gabbana promoted a large show in Shanghai with videos titled Qi kuai chi fan, Pick Up the Chopsticks and Eat. The brand deleted them from Weibo. On November 21, a screenshot of a private chat with the designer Stefano Gabbana spread on Weibo. That evening the show was cancelled. Its stage, which had cost eight million yuan, was already built.
In a later apology video, the two founders said duibuqi, sorry, in Chinese. Chinese Wikipedia files the episode under the heading “the controversy over insulting China.”
In May 1930, Mao Zedong wrote a short essay called Oppose Book Worship. Its first section opens: meiyou diaocha, meiyou fayanquan. “No investigation, no right to speak.” Mao continued: “If you have not investigated a question, you forfeit your right to speak on that question.”
The rice scientist Yuan Longping used to tell his students: “Rice does not grow in a computer, and it does not grow in books. To grow good rice, one has to go down into the fields.”
His student Li Jianwu recalled the words in People’s Daily in 2021. For decades, he wrote, going into the fields was almost part of Yuan’s daily life. Yuan carried dry rations with him to Yunnan, Hainan and Guangdong.