Alibaba’s founders are known as the shiba luohan, the Eighteen Arhats. A 2019 article in Hangzhou’s city news explains: “The Eighteen Arhats are the 18 people who founded Alibaba together at Hupan Garden in 1999.” They built the Alibaba website in Jack Ma’s home on that housing estate in Hangzhou.
Among the eighteen were Joe Tsai, Peng Lei and Dai Shan. Several of them later became partners of Alibaba.
Liu Bang, the founder of the Han dynasty, began his rise in the area of Feng, Pei and Dang, and his first troops came mainly from there. Historians therefore call his core group the Feng-Pei group. Of the early Han chancellors, Xiao He, Cao Can and Wang Ling belonged to it. The grand commandants Lu Wan, Zhou Bo and Guan Ying were all members.
An article in The Paper cites a count of twenty identifiable members of Liu Bang’s early core. Fourteen of them, about 70 percent, came from Pei county.
In chapter 3 of Dream of the Red Chamber, the young Lin Daiyu arrives at the Jia mansion in the capital. She has often heard her mother say that this house is not like other families. “So she took care at every step and paid attention at every moment. She would not say one word more or take one step more than she had to, for fear of being laughed at.” (步步留心，时时在意，不肯轻易多说一句话，多行一步路，惟恐被人耻笑了他去)
The house is the home of her own grandmother.
After Zhuge Liang laid out his plan for the realm, Liu Bei “grew closer to him day by day.” The Records of the Three Kingdoms continues: “Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and the others were displeased.” Liu Bei explained: “For me to have Kongming is like a fish having water. I ask you gentlemen not to speak of it again.” (孤之有孔明，犹鱼之有水也。愿诸君勿复言。) Guan Yu and Zhang Fei stopped.
In 1999, Yang Yiyan published a case study of how trust is built, titled Zijiren (自己人), “One of Us,” in the journal Sociological Studies (社会学研究). Yang argued that Chinese people include others within the boundary of their own self, the family, and that this forms a boundary of trust.
Yang wrote that the boundary can move. “Through interaction, an outsider can be accepted as one of us.” Turning an outsider into one of us generally means a process “from strangeness or surface contact to intimacy, trust and a sense of obligation, or deep interaction.”
The Taiwanese scholar Cheng Bor-Shiuan was among the first to apply Fei Xiaotong’s differential mode of association to Chinese organizations. He proposed the concept of chaxu shi lingdao (差序式领导), differential leadership. In a study published in 1995, he named a typical sign of favoritism among Chinese leaders. They are “generous and understanding toward insiders, strict and demanding toward outsiders.”
A 2018 review in the journal Foreign Economics and Management sums up the concept. Such a leader divides subordinates into “insiders” and “outsiders” by how close the relationship is, how loyal they are and how capable they are.
On February 15, 1945, Mao Zedong spoke about shantou zhuyi (山头主义), “mountaintop-ism,” in which each group in the Party holds to its own hill. He did not deny that such groups existed. “Acknowledging that mountaintop-ism exists,” he said, “has the purpose of eliminating the mountaintops, so that they melt together and the whole Party becomes one body.”
In 2000, the researchers Chow, Deng and Ho published a survey of 142 managers on how openly knowledge is shared inside organizations. They reported in the Journal of Management Accounting Research that managers in China “shared knowledge significantly less with a potential recipient who was not a member of their ingroup.”
一回生，二回熟 Strangers the first time, acquaintances the second. The Handian dictionary explains: at the first meeting people feel like strangers, at the next meeting they know each other. Its example comes from Zhou Libo’s novel The Hurricane: “We were strangers the first time, and now we know each other. Be sure to drop in.”
多个朋友多条路 One more friend, one more road.
自己人 Our own people, those close to us.
胳膊肘往外拐 The elbow bends outward. Said of someone who helps outsiders against their own people.
肥水不流外人田 Rich water does not flow into an outsider’s field. Keep the good things within the family.