走后门 To go through the back door. The Handian dictionary defines it as getting things done “through improper personal relationships or channels.”
托人情 To ask someone to put in a word on one’s behalf.
说情 To plead for another person, to ask for leniency or help on someone’s behalf. In the Qing novel The Scholars, frightened people beg a local gentleman for his card so that he will plead with the magistrate for them.
The campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius ran from early 1974 to about June of that year. In a written comment on a speech by Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong wrote: “Now metaphysics is rampant, one-sidedness. Criticizing Lin and Confucius is mixed with going through the back door, and this may dilute the criticism of Lin and Confucius.”
In 2016, the think tank of the magazine People’s Forum published a survey of public tolerance in China. It asked how people respond to several kinds of conflict. Most respondents chose to smooth things over or to talk. Faced with “judicial injustice or rough law enforcement,” 26.4 percent said they would “find connections to smooth things over.”
In chapter 6 of Dream of the Red Chamber, the poor country woman Liu Laolao hopes for help from the great Jia household. “The gate of a noble house is as deep as the sea,” she says. “Nobody there knows me.” Her son-in-law has a plan. She should first find Zhou Rui, a servant of the lady of the house. “This Zhou Rui once did a piece of business with my father. We were on very good terms.”
At the side gate, the doormen ignore her and tell her to wait by the wall. She finds Zhou Rui’s wife instead. Years before, Gou’er had helped Zhou Rui a great deal in a dispute over buying land, so his wife finds it hard to refuse. She takes Liu Laolao first to Pinger, the trusted maid of Wang Xifeng. Only then is Liu Laolao led in.
In March 2015, the General Offices of the Party Central Committee and the State Council issued rules on leading officials who interfere in judicial cases. Article 5 says that judicial staff “must record such interference fully and truthfully, so that every step leaves a trace and can be checked.”
The rules also cover interference through an official’s staff or relatives. Their requests must be recorded too.
The psychologist Hwang Kwang-kuo built a model of how Chinese people decide on a request. Starting from Fei Xiaotong’s idea of ties that are closer or more distant, he divides relationships into three kinds: expressive, mixed and instrumental.
Each kind follows its own rule. For expressive ties, the rule of need applies. For instrumental ties, the rule of fairness applies. For mixed ties, the person who controls the resource follows the rule of renqing (人情). He weighs what helping would cost against the return that may come in the future.
关系户 A relationship household. A unit or person that gains benefits or convenience through special connections.
一人得道，鸡犬升天 When one man attains the Way, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven. When one person gains power, everyone connected with him rises too. Said with irony. The image comes from the Han dynasty Lunheng, which tells of a king whose whole household rose to heaven with him, so that dogs barked in the sky and chickens crowed in the clouds.
欠情 To owe feeling. To have received a kindness and not yet repaid it. In The Plum in the Golden Vase, a man greets another: “I have owed you feeling for a long time and have not come to see you, brother.”
领情 To receive feeling. To accept a gift or a kindness and feel grateful for it.
回礼 To return a courtesy. To answer a gift or a greeting with one of one’s own.
雪中送炭 To send charcoal in the snow. To help someone in urgent need. A Ming story sets it against 锦上添花, adding flowers to brocade: “There is only adding flowers to brocade. Where is there sending charcoal in the snow?”
The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang did fieldwork in Xiajia, a village in Heilongjiang. As The Paper summarizes his finding, a gift “creates a spiritual bond between the giver and the receiver, which the villagers call renqing (人情).”
In a 1988 survey in Tianjin, the sociologist Bian Yanjie found that jobs were obtained through strong ties more often than through weak ties. Job seekers often reached their helpers through an intermediary to whom both sides had strong ties, and those who used such indirect ties got better jobs. He published the study in 1997 in the American Sociological Review as “Bringing Strong Ties Back In.”