一寸光阴一寸金 An inch of time is an inch of gold. The line comes from the Tang poet Wang Zhenbai: “Reading, I did not notice that spring was already deep. An inch of time is an inch of gold.”
少壮不努力，老大徒伤悲 If one does not strive when young, one grieves in vain when old. The lines end the anonymous Han poem Long Song. “A hundred rivers flow east to the sea. When will they return west?”
少年易老学难成，一寸光阴不可轻 “Youth grows old easily, and learning is hard to achieve. Not an inch of time may be taken lightly.” For a long time the poem was believed to be the work of the Song philosopher Zhu Xi.
It does not appear in Zhu Xi’s collected works. The attribution goes back to Japanese school textbooks of classical Chinese from the Meiji era. Japanese scholars have traced the poem to a monk of the Gozan Zen monasteries of the Muromachi period, Kanchu Chutei, whose collection Seihoshu is its oldest known source. A study from Hiroshima University says it can be stated with confidence that Kanchu wrote the poem. Many Chinese sources still credit Zhu Xi.
The Analects records: “The Master stood by a river and said: ‘It passes on like this, never ceasing day or night.'” (子在川上曰：逝者如斯夫！不舍昼夜。)
The passage is known as chuan shang tan, the sigh by the river.
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.
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.”
In March 1981, Yuan Geng, head of the Shekou Industrial Zone in Shenzhen, wrote the slogan “Time is money, efficiency is life.” It brought him heavy criticism. Critics called him “a capitalist who wants money and lives” and spoke of “the restoration of capitalism.” The giant billboard was put up in Shekou and taken down several times.
In January 1984, Deng Xiaoping endorsed the slogan on his first visit to Shenzhen. On October 1, 1984, it rode past Tiananmen on the Shekou float in the National Day parade.