During basic training, the young soldier Lei Feng did many good deeds in his camp and in the city of Yingkou without leaving his name (做好事不留名). He died on duty in 1962, at the age of 21. On March 5, 1963, Mao Zedong wrote the inscription “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng,” and March 5 became Learn from Lei Feng Day.
His diary, found and published after his death, contains the line “I want to be a screw forever” (我愿永远做一个螺丝钉).
Chapter 2 of the Daodejing describes the sage. “He gives life but does not possess. He acts but does not rely on it. He accomplishes his work but does not dwell on it (功成而弗居). Because he does not dwell on it, it does not leave him.”
The commentator Wang Bi added: “If one places the merit in oneself, the merit cannot last.”
哪里哪里 Where, where? Meaning: not at all. Often followed by 我还差得远, I still have far to go.
你过奖了 You praise me too much.
不敢当 I dare not accept it.
In October 2025, a Xinhua commentary said that the new achievements of the 14th Five-Year Plan period were “fundamentally due to the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core.”
A year-end economic review in December 2025 used the same phrase in its first sentence. “Under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core,” it said, all regions and departments had carried out the new development philosophy, and the economy had moved forward.
The song The Moon on the Fifteenth (十五的月亮) was written in 1984 and first performed on CCTV that Mid-Autumn Festival. At the Spring Festival Gala on February 19, 1985, Dong Wenhua sang it with Liu Peide, and she became famous overnight.
The lyricist wrote it for the wives of soldiers, who run the family at home alone. Its line giving the wife a share in the soldier’s military medal became a catchphrase.
On April 24, 1945, Mao Zedong gave the political report to the Seventh Party Congress, On Coalition Government. In the 1945 text he said: “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force that creates the world.”
In 1947, the sociologist Fei Xiaotong published a series of essays on rural society, collected in 1948 as Rural China (乡土中国). In them he named the pattern of Chinese social relations chaxu geju (差序格局), the differential mode of association.
“Our pattern,” he wrote, is like “the ripples that spread out in circles when a stone is thrown onto the water. Each person is the center of the circles pushed out by his own social influence.”
The Duke of She told Confucius: “In my village there is an upright man. When his father stole a sheep, he testified against him.” Confucius replied: “The upright in my village are different. A father conceals for his son, and a son conceals for his father. Uprightness lies in this.” (Analects 13.18)
Later law reflected the same principle. The Tang Code did not punish members of the same household and close relatives who concealed one another’s crimes.
Under Article 193 of the Criminal Procedure Law, a court may compel a witness who refuses without good reason to appear in court. The law makes one exception: the spouse, parents and children of the accused. The same rule stood in the 2012 version of the law as Article 188.
The exemption protects close relatives from being forced into court as witnesses against the accused.
礼不下庶人，刑不上大夫. “The rites do not reach down to the common people. Punishments do not reach up to the high officials.”
The line comes from the chapter Quli in the Book of Rites, one of the Confucian classics.