请假 To request leave.
批假 To approve leave.
销假 To close one’s leave. To report back to a superior after an absence.
The Handian dictionary defines 假, leave, as being away from work or study for a time “according to the rules or with approval upon request.”
On June 24, 2021, the video platform Kuaishou announced that from July 1 it would end 大小周, big and small weeks. According to the National Business Daily, employees would now work overtime as needed and be paid for it.
On July 9, ByteDance announced that from August 1 it would end its own arrangement of working every other Sunday.
Jiao Yulu, the Party secretary of Lankao County in Henan, suffered from liver disease. To stop the pain while he worked, he pressed one end of a hard object against his liver and the other against the back of his rattan chair. In time, a large hole was worn through the right side of the chair. Retellings name different objects, among them the knob of a teacup lid and a clothes brush.
In February 1966, Xinhua released a long report on him, A Model for County Party Secretaries, by the reporters Mu Qing, Feng Jian and Zhou Yuan. The chair is kept at the Jiao Yulu memorial park in Lankao. In 2026, Xinhua wrote that its story “moved almost everyone who has seen it.”
In August 2025, an article from the Workers’ Daily, republished on the Beijing Daily news site, described a “distorted overtime culture.” One of its forms was 表演式加班, performative overtime. The article gave this example: “I leave only after the leader leaves, and when others work overtime, I work overtime too.”
At Alibaba’s tenth-anniversary gala in September 2009, the founder Jack Ma came on stage in a punk costume, with a rooster comb and white hair. He sang “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from The Lion King.
At the company’s eighteenth anniversary in 2017, he danced a Michael Jackson routine. An Alibaba spokeswoman told CNN that such performances were “a routine thing,” and compared them to “a team-building exercise.”
In June 2021, The Paper reported on 团建, team building, citing a 2021 survey of internet workers by the career platform Maimai. About 20 percent of workers born in the 1990s said they liked team-building activities.
The paper also read 468 comments on Maimai about team building. “Taking up holiday time has become the number one reason people dislike team building,” it concluded.
套近乎 To seek ties with someone one does not know well, in order to show closeness. The Handian dictionary notes that it is often used critically.
拉关系 To make contact with someone one did not know before, in order to build a relationship.
自家人 People who are close to each other. The dictionary’s example: “We have always treated you as one of the family.”
In August 2017, China News Service, reprinting the Yangtze Evening News, reported that nine in ten new employees interviewed found it hard to know how to address colleagues. The forms in use included 王工, Engineer Wang, 师傅, master, and 姐 and 哥, sister and brother.
The same month, the China Youth Daily gave a warning about one familiar offer: “Some people will say, just call me Little Liu. But if he is a senior colleague, calling him that is somewhat inappropriate.”
In January 2025, Xinhua listed the levels of “Spring Festival anxiety.” At one level, a person is asked “How much is your salary,” “How big is your apartment” and “What was your exam rank.” There are also countless questions asked “for your own good”: “Have you found a partner? How big is your year-end bonus?”
A security guard in Shanghai, surnamed Wang, asked for leave from January 6 to 13 to go home to his critically ill father. The leave was not approved. He went home, and on January 31 he was dismissed.
In a judgment of December 15, 2020, the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court held the dismissal unlawful. “The limits of an employer’s management power, and the way it is exercised, should also be kind, tolerant and reasonable,” the court said. “Respecting folk custom and sympathizing with employees’ concrete difficulties and misfortunes is also what an employer ought to do.”
In July 2025, the Beijing No. 3 Intermediate People’s Court upheld a similar ruling for a care-home employee, surnamed Qiao, who had left his post for his brother’s funeral. His reason, it found, was “urgent and reasonable, and in line with ordinary human feeling and good custom.”