The Ming scholar Qian Fu (1461 to 1504), a top graduate of the imperial examinations, wrote the Song of Tomorrow. “Tomorrow and again tomorrow, how many tomorrows there are! If I live waiting for tomorrow, all things will come to nothing.” (明日复明日，明日何其多。我生待明日，万事成蹉跎。)
The Education Bureau of Hong Kong lists the poem among its recommended passages for primary schools.
On January 9, 1963, in Guangzhou, Mao Zedong wrote a poem to the tune Man Jiang Hong in reply to Guo Moruo. One line reads: “Ten thousand years is too long. Seize the morning, seize the evening.” (一万年太久，只争朝夕)
His handwritten final version is carved on a marble wall in the south hall of the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall.
In 1934, Lu Xun wrote the essay Layman’s Talk on Writing. In it, he argued for a Latin alphabet for Chinese, partly because it could be written fast. “The Americans say that time is money. But I think time is life. To waste another person’s time for no reason is really no different from robbing and killing him.”
The next sentence turns back on Lu Xun and his friends: “But people like us, sitting here in the cool and chatting idly, are an exception.”
In February 2020, when schools were closed by the epidemic, the China Youth Daily reported on final-year high school students preparing at home for the gaokao, the national college entrance exam. More than one student said that the “gaokao countdown” that used to hang on the classroom blackboard had moved to the class QQ chat group.
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.
下海 To go down into the sea. To leave a secure post and go into business. After Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in early 1992, a wave of officials did so. Figures differ. People’s Daily’s magazine Global People cited the China Business Times: at least 100,000 Party and government cadres went into business that year. China Economic Weekly put the number who resigned at 120,000, and those who went into business without resigning at more than ten million.
Some kept a way back. 停薪留职 means to stop the pay and keep the post. Global People, citing Liaoning figures, reported that about 35,000 officials in the province resigned around 1992 to go into business, and that another 700 took leave on these terms to start companies.
In the early hours of May 17, 2019, after the US Commerce Department added Huawei to its Entity List, He Tingbo of Huawei’s chip maker HiSilicon wrote to its staff. Thousands of HiSilicon people, she wrote, had built “spare tires” for the company’s survival, for a case they had assumed would never happen. “Today history has made its choice. All the spare tires we ever built have become regulars overnight.”
藏器待时 To keep one’s tools hidden and wait for the time. To build one’s abilities and wait for the moment to use them. The phrase comes from the Book of Changes: “The gentleman keeps his tools on his person and waits for the time to act.” (君子藏器于身，待时而动)
On June 28, 1924, Hu Shi published a short satire, Chabuduo xiansheng zhuan, “The Biography of Mr. More-or-Less.” Its hero’s motto is: “In everything, more or less is good enough. Why be so sharp?” He brings home white sugar instead of brown. He misses a train by two minutes and finds the railway company “too serious.” When he falls ill, his family fetches a cattle doctor instead of the physician. Within the hour he is dead.
After his death, people praise him and give him the posthumous name Master Yuantong, “the all-accommodating.” The essay ends: “But from then on, China became a nation of lazy people.”