中间人 A person in the middle. Someone who introduces, mediates or witnesses between two sides.
和事佬 A peacemaker. Someone who settles quarrels.
说和 To talk two sides into making peace. The word appears in Dream of the Red Chamber.
托人 To entrust a matter to another person. To ask someone to act on one’s behalf.
礼尚往来 Propriety values going and coming. The line comes from the Book of Rites: “The highest value is virtue. Next comes giving and repaying. Propriety values going and coming. To give and receive nothing back is against propriety. To receive and give nothing back is also against propriety.”
Today the phrase is used for gifts and favors, and also for answering a person in kind.
As a poor young man, Han Xin fished below the city wall of Huaiyin. A washerwoman saw that he was hungry and fed him for the several dozen days of her washing. He told her that he would repay her richly. She was angry. “A grown man who cannot feed himself! I fed you out of pity. Do you think I expected a reward?”
Years later, Han Xin became King of Chu. He summoned the washerwoman and gave her a thousand gold. Han Xin had once eaten for months at the house of a local official, until the official’s wife stopped serving him. To this man he gave a hundred coins. “You are a small man. Your kindness did not last to the end.” (Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian)
In chapter 50 of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the defeated Cao Cao flees by the Huarong road and finds Guan Yu waiting for him. Guan Yu has signed a military pledge to stop him. Cao Cao asks him to “give weight to the feelings of former days.”
Guan Yu answers that he once received Cao Cao’s great kindness, “but I have already repaid it” by killing two enemy generals and lifting a siege. Cao Cao asks whether he still remembers the five passes, where Guan Yu killed Cao Cao’s generals as he left him years before. Guan Yu turns his horse and orders his men to spread out, which plainly means letting Cao Cao go.
Back at camp, Zhuge Liang says: “Guan Yu thought of Cao Cao’s old kindness and let him go on purpose. But there is a military pledge.”
人情 Human feeling. Also a favor, or a gift. 做个人情, to do someone a favor.
卖人情 To sell a favor. To do someone a good turn on purpose, so that they feel grateful. A dictionary gives the example: “If you sell him a favor today, he will surely repay you in the future.”
人情世故 Human feeling and the ways of the world. The knowledge of how to deal with people.
At a Chinese wedding, guests give gift money, a custom called 随份子. A commentary published in Chinese media in September 2026 described its logic. Gift money “has taken on a kind of contractual character.” A guest gives now so as to receive “an equal return gift from the other side” at their own wedding in the future. “From this angle, it is even like an interest-free loan.”
The same piece reported that the city of Shangluo in Shaanxi had issued reference limits on gift money: no more than 100 yuan in the countryside and 200 yuan in the city.
Before he announced his new laws, the Qin reformer Shang Yang feared that the people would not believe him. He set up a pole three zhang tall at the south gate of the capital’s market and offered ten gold to anyone who moved it to the north gate.
People found this strange, and nobody moved it. He raised the reward to fifty. One man moved it and was paid fifty at once, “to show that there was no deceit.” Then the laws were issued. The story is in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, and it is known as 徙木立信, moving a pole to establish trust.
Zengzi’s wife was going to the market, and their son followed her, crying. She told him to go home and promised to kill the pig for him when she came back. When she returned, Zengzi was about to catch the pig. She stopped him. “I was only joking with the child.”
Zengzi answered: “A child is not someone to joke with. A child does not yet know anything. He learns from his parents and listens to what they teach. If you deceive him now, you teach him to deceive.” He cooked the pig. The Han Feizi tells the story under the line “When small trust is kept, great trust is established.”
Confucius said: “A person who is not trustworthy, I do not know how he can be of any use. A large cart without a yoke pin, a small cart without a collar pin, how can they move?” (Analects 2.22)
Asked what a state needs, Confucius named enough food, enough weapons and the trust of the people. If one had to go, he would give up the weapons first, then the food. “Since ancient times, all have died. Without trust, the people cannot stand.” (Analects 12.7)
In July 2013, the Supreme People’s Court adopted rules for publishing a list of 失信被执行人, judgment debtors who have broken faith. These are people who are able to do what a court has ordered and do not. In everyday speech, they are called 老赖, deadbeats.
The court said that in cases from 2008 to 2012 where debtors had assets, more than 70 percent of them had evaded or resisted enforcement. By June 30, 2018, the courts had published 11.23 million entries. People on the list had been blocked from buying plane tickets 12.22 million times and high-speed train tickets 4.58 million times.