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?”
The television series Blossoms Shanghai (繁花), Wong Kar-wai’s first television work, premiered on CCTV-8 on December 27, 2023. Huanghe Road in Shanghai was rebuilt at full scale for the series. The restaurant Zhizhenyuan in the series is modeled on Taishengyuan, a real restaurant there.
A Sichuan financial paper recalled the real street. “Most of the people who came to Huanghe Road to eat were merchants. While eating, they could not avoid talking business.”
“Once, ‘a good deal must be done at the wine table.’ For many officials in charge of attracting investment, this had become a fixed way of thinking.” The business paper National Business Daily wrote this in June 2017.
In June 2016, the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection reported a campaign in Anhui against jiuzhuo bangong (酒桌办公), “doing office work at the wine table.” It targeted officials who used the wine table “to ask for funds, to chase projects, to compete for places in evaluations or to seek improper benefits.”
A 2014 report on the hotpot chain Haidilao described how it looks after its staff. “Every month, the company sends part of the bonus to the parents, back home, of managers and outstanding employees.” The staff dormitories were described as “regular apartments, with air conditioning, heating and internet,” about twenty minutes’ walk from work. The founder Zhang Yong set up a boarding school in Jianyang, Sichuan, for employees’ children.
Since 2005, Haidilao has paid education subsidies to employees’ children. A 2024 report said that its scholarship had gone to 1,443 children of employees over four years, a total of 13.8 million yuan.
A media survey of 2,005 people, cited by the Legal Daily in January 2022, found that 92.3 percent had been pressed to drink, and 74 percent said they accepted when they could not get out of it.
Drinking rhymes make the link between alcohol and feeling: 感情深，一口闷, “if the feeling is deep, drink it in one,” and 只要感情铁，哪怕胃出血, “as long as the friendship is iron, never mind a bleeding stomach.” In a 2021 appeal in Shanghai, two men who had urged a woman to drink before her death were held liable for 12 and 8 percent of the compensation.
In February 2012, the China Youth Daily reported a poll of 1,704 people by its social research center. More than 56 percent complained that they attended banquets too often. Business dinners were the least welcome kind, named by 65.4 percent. Of those who felt anxious about banquets, 84.5 percent named drinking as a reason.
Only 2.4 percent flatly refused to attend. A bank clerk in Tianjin explained why he went. The banquets, he said, “can help develop and maintain relationships with clients and colleagues as well.”