Since 2019, Beijing has handled residents’ complaints under a system called jie su ji ban, handle a complaint as soon as it is received. Its main channel is the 12345 citizen service hotline, which answers 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.
On September 24, 2021, the city adopted Regulations on Handling Complaints Upon Receipt, which then took effect. Each work order now states the deadline by which the complaint must be handled.
In March 2018, during the annual session of the national legislature, Xinhua reported the words of a member of the national political advisory body. “The ‘shop boy’ spirit is a new requirement put forward by Shanghai,” he said. It asks for a stronger sense of service, “to be good ‘shop boys’ serving enterprises, to respond to every request and not to disturb them otherwise.”
The dianxiao’er, the shop boy, is the old word for an attendant in an inn or a tavern.
Haidilao, founded by Zhang Yong in 1994 in Jianyang, Sichuan, is the largest hot pot chain in China. It is known for attentive service. In 2011 a book about the company by Huang Tiejian, Haidilao: You Can’t Learn It, swept the country.
The service also draws criticism. A 2022 article on the business site TMTPost wrote that its birthday greetings had become a scene of mass embarrassment, and that doubts about “pathological service and excessive service” kept coming.
A post on the marketing site Digitaling retells a designers’ joke about a client who asks for “a colorful black” (wucai banlan de hei), and then for “a slightly brighter black.” The client in the joke is jiafang baba, Party A daddy. The post says that Party A daddy “seems to have a mysterious obsession with the variety of black.”
According to a report from January 2019, an official of the Ministry of Public Security had said the year before that “5+2” and “white plus black” had become the daily working state of China’s police.
“Five plus two” adds the weekend to the five working days. “White plus black” adds the night to the day.
Ms. Li joined a technology company in April 2019 and was dismissed in December 2020. She claimed pay for more than 500 hours of overtime. Her evidence included chat records, screenshots from the DingTalk app and a duty roster for the company’s social media accounts on weekends and holidays. The court of first instance rejected her claim.
On appeal, the Beijing No. 3 Intermediate People’s Court ordered the company to pay her 30,000 yuan. According to the reports, the court held that the idea of a workplace should be weakened. What counts is whether the employee provided substantive work. The Beijing News called it the first case in China to address yinxing jiaban, hidden overtime, in a judgment.
In 2024, the Supreme People’s Court wrote the test for hidden overtime online into its annual work report: “substantive work” and “obvious use of time.”
At Huawei, the mattress became a symbol. A company text from 2006, titled Heaven Rewards Diligence, describes the origin of Huawei’s chuangdian wenhua, mattress culture. In the words of the business site Jiemian, the mattress stands for “a culture of continuous striving.” Ren Zhengfei once said: “Huawei has no money. If people do not strive, it will collapse. We cannot pay anything for those who do not strive.”
In 2008, Ren played the symbol down. “The mattress is not a culture. Culture can be passed on. A mattress is only a tool for an afternoon nap.”
靠谱 Reliable. Said of what is sensible and makes sense. A dictionary example: “This person does things reliably.”
放鸽子 To release the pigeons. To break an appointment and lose someone’s trust.
凡事有交代，件件有着落，事事有回音 Every matter accounted for, every item settled, every message answered. A business article says that some people define being reliable by these three things, and that the three are really one: closing the loop.
On April 12, 2019, Jack Ma told an internal Alibaba event that being able to work “996,” from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, was “a huge blessing.” For companies like Alibaba, he said, it was a fubao (福报), a reward earned by good deeds.
Ma later wrote on Weibo that no company should or could force employees to work 996. In August 2021, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the Supreme People’s Court published model labor cases against unlawful overtime rules.