From 2010, according to the business site Huxiu, Huawei promoted a “strivers agreement.” Employees who signed it became fendouzhe, strivers. They gave up annual leave, marriage leave and other benefits, and in return could share in company stock.
In a later court case, Huawei submitted one employee’s pledge: “I voluntarily become a striver, and voluntarily give up paid annual leave and annual leave pay during my work at the company.”
In the Ming and Qing examinations, the baguwen, the eight-legged essay, had eight parts in a fixed order, from “breaking the topic” to “binding the legs.” The last four each had two parallel, balanced passages, which made the eight legs. The topics all came from the Four Books and Five Classics.
On February 8, 1942, Mao Zedong gave a speech called Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing, Fandui dang bagu. He listed its “eight great crimes” in the manner of an eight-legged essay. The first: “Empty talk at great length, words without substance.”
In The Words of the Orange Seller, Liu Ji tells of a fruit seller in Hangzhou whose oranges kept through summer and winter. They looked “like jade in substance and gold in color” and sold for ten times the price. Liu bought one and cut it open. Something like smoke hit his nose. Inside, it was dry as old cotton wadding.
The seller laughed. “I have done this trade for years, and I live by it. I sell them, people buy them, and no one has ever said a word. Are you alone not satisfied?” Then he asked whether the generals with their tiger tallies and the officials in tall hats could really do what they appeared to do. “Where would one go and not find gold and jade outside, rotten wadding inside?”
The idiom jin yu qi wai, bai xu qi zhong comes from this line.
In the Han Feizi, a man of Chu goes to Zheng to sell a pearl. He makes a casket of magnolia wood, perfumes it with cinnamon and pepper, and decorates it with pearls and jade, red gems and kingfisher feathers. A man of Zheng buys the casket and gives back the pearl.
The idiom mai du huan zhu, to buy the casket and return the pearl, means to value the outside and neglect the substance.
The guange ti, the style of the halls and pavilions, was the standard regular script of the Qing court. Every character had the same shape, size and stroke weight, written black, square and glossy. The examinations required it. A candidate who did not write the standard style could not enter the Hanlin Academy.
The papers of the palace examination were not recopied by clerks before marking. According to Chinese Wikipedia, the candidate’s handwriting therefore often decided the result, to the point of “suppressing the composition and valuing the calligraphy.”
On June 18, 2013, at a work conference in Beijing, Xi Jinping named the “four winds” that the Party’s new campaign would fight: formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance. Formalism came first.
In July 2023, a Xinhua commentary called “carrying out meetings with meetings and implementing documents with documents” a chronic bad practice that had to be fought harder. In June 2024, an article on the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection warned against “implementing meetings with meetings and implementing documents with documents.”
In January 2016, CCTV’s documentary channel broadcast Wo zai Gugong xiu wenwu, I Restore Relics in the Forbidden City. Its three parts follow the Palace Museum’s restorers of bronzes, court clocks, ceramics, woodwork, lacquer, inlay, embroidery and paintings. The clock restorer Wang Jin is shown repairing a large clock from the Qianlong period. His attitude was summed up as “choose one thing, and do it for a lifetime.”
The series became an unexpected hit on the video site Bilibili and reached a rare score of 9.5 on Douban. A film version followed in December 2016.
The Luban Award, founded in 1987 and named after the ancient master builder Lu Ban, is the highest award for construction quality in China. A winning project must show no quality defects or hidden risks after a year in use. Inspectors read the files and check the quality of the work on site.
The China Sports Museum, built for the Asian Games and completed in 1990, received a special Luban Award for Asian Games projects. Within 15 years it had become a dangerous building. Experts found that the wall mortar did not match the design and lacked the required strength. Work had started late and was rushed, but the building passed acceptance and opened in time for the Games.
精益求精 Already fine, and seeking finer still. From Zhu Xi’s note on a line in the Analects: those who work bone and horn cut and then file, those who work jade and stone carve and then polish, “already fine, and still seeking finer.”
一丝不苟 Not careless by a single thread. Conscientious down to the smallest detail. The dictionary cites the novel The Scholars: “When the superiors learn of it and see that he is not careless by a single thread, promotion is near.”
推敲 Push and knock. The poet Jia Dao could not decide whether his monk should push or knock at the gate under the moon. Han Yu told him that knock was better. The word now means to weigh words with care.
性价比 The ratio of quality to price. The relation between a product’s quality, performance, features or service and what it costs.
物美价廉 Fine goods at a low price. The phrase appears in the late Qing writer Zheng Guanying. Zhu De used it in a call to handicraft cooperatives: “Promote fine goods at low prices, cheat neither old nor young, oppose shoddy work and skimped materials.”
价廉物美 The same words in reverse order. In Lu Xun’s story The New Year’s Sacrifice, the narrator remembers the shark fin at the Fuxing restaurant: “one yuan for a large plate, cheap and good.”
薄利多销 Thin profit, many sales. Earning little on each item, and still a good profit on the volume.