The Whampoa Alumni Association

On June 16, 1984, the Whampoa Military Academy Alumni Association was founded with the approval of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. It is an association of the academy’s graduates. Its aims are “to carry forward the Whampoa spirit, to link the feelings of the classmates, to promote the reunification of the motherland and to work for the revival of China.”

In 2024, the year of the academy’s centenary and the association’s fortieth anniversary, Xi Jinping sent the association a letter of congratulations. He called the academy a product of the first cooperation between the Nationalists and the Communists. He described the association as a patriotic group that links Whampoa graduates and their relatives at home and abroad.

Same-Year Graduates

In the imperial examinations, men who passed on the same list or in the same year were called tongnian (同年), “same year.” In a story in the Ming collection Constant Words to Awaken the World (醒世恒言), one character tells another: “Although you and I passed in the same year from different provinces, today we meet at the edge of the world, and we are like flesh and blood.”

Lei Jun Gives Back

On November 29, 2023, in the 130th anniversary year of Wuhan University, Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, gave the university 1.3 billion yuan. He had entered its computer science department in 1987. “The journey of fulfilling a vow, which began with my first donation to my alma mater 26 years ago,” he said, “has today finally reached its wish.”

He added that every donation is an alumnus’s love for the alma mater, “and each one weighs the same.”

Hometown and Alumni Associations

The Communist Party’s Regulations on Disciplinary Action name hometown, alumni and comrades-in-arms associations, among others. The provision reads: “Party members who are leading cadres and who, in violation of the relevant rules, organize or take part in spontaneously formed hometown associations, alumni associations, comrades-in-arms associations and the like shall, where the circumstances are serious, be given a warning, a serious warning or removal from Party posts.”

The provision was Article 68 in the 2015 version of the regulations, Article 74 in 2018 and Article 82 in 2023.

Gaginang

In the Teochew dialect of Chaoshan, “our own people” sounds roughly like gaginang. Some write it 胶己人, but the linguist Lin Lunlun says the correct form is 家己人.

An article on Chaoshan identity describes the effect of the word among Teochew people far from home: “Wherever you go, if you say one word, gaginang, there is no one who will not help.”

A Crosstalk Lineage

In crosstalk, xiangsheng, a performer is expected to have a master. A performer with no recognized line of teachers is called a haiqing, and colleagues in the trade look down on him.

A People’s Daily article described taking a master as “the public announcement of a contract. The master must be responsible for the disciple, and the disciple must respect the teacher.” When Yan Xiaoru became a disciple of Ma Sanli in 1948, Li Jiechen stood at the ceremony as guarantor, baoshi.

Patron and Disciple

Under the Tang imperial examinations, a successful candidate regarded the chief examiner who passed him as his zuozhu, his patron, and himself as the examiner’s mensheng, his disciple. In the words of the literary historian Hu Kexian, “the patron regarded his disciples as his ‘estate fields,’ and the disciples regarded their patron as the ‘owner of the garden.'”

Candidates who had failed many times felt especially grateful once they passed. After the examiner Gao Ying died, Bai Juyi passed his old house and still wrote a poem of gratitude.

Zhejiang Village

In the 1980s, people from Wenzhou in Zhejiang settled in Beijing’s Fengtai District to trade. Their district became known as “Zhejiang Village.” The anthropologist Xiang Biao studied it. When people there needed workers in 1984, he writes, they wrote home or even went back in person, to mobilize relatives and find suitable girls through kin networks and in their own and nearby villages. “This was common in Zhejiang Village.”

“Our own people,” he notes, meant “direct relatives or good friends, who would speak up for one when needed.” By 1987, newcomers no longer needed a tie to someone already there. He counts 96,000 outsiders in the area beside 14,000 Beijing natives.

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