China

Overview

The land and the people

China is the third or fourth largest country by area and runs from the Himalayas and the high Tibetan plateau in the west to the Pacific coast in the east, across northern deserts and the basins of its two great rivers, the Yellow River in the north and the Yangtze through the centre. A rough line of mountains and the Huai River splits the country into a wheat-eating, noodle-eating north and a rice-eating south, a divide still felt in food and in the way people picture one another. China was the most populous country in the world until India passed it around 2023, and about 1.4 billion people remain. Roughly ninety-two percent are Han Chinese, a label that itself covers vast regional difference, and the rest belong to fifty-five officially recognised minorities, among them the Zhuang, the Hui, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, the Mongols, and the Manchu. Several hold their own autonomous regions, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Guangxi, where minority language and custom sit alongside a growing Han presence and, in some, real strain.

One script, many tongues

The most distinctive fact about Chinese is that its writing unifies what its speech divides. The official spoken language is Standard Mandarin, called Putonghua, the 'common speech', built on the Beijing dialect and taught in every school. But 'Chinese' is really a family of languages as far apart as the Romance tongues of Europe: Cantonese in the south and in Hong Kong, Shanghainese on the east coast, Hokkien across Fujian and Taiwan, Hakka, and more, many of them impossible to follow across the line when spoken aloud. What lets a Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker who cannot hold a conversation still read the same page is the script itself. Chinese characters stand for meanings rather than sounds, so one written text carries across every spoken form, and it has done so for more than three thousand years, the oldest writing system still in use. The mainland simplified thousands of characters in the 1950s and 1960s to spread literacy, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau kept the traditional forms. The steady promotion of Putonghua over the regional languages is one of the live cultural arguments in the country now.

The weight of the past

China dates its written history from the Shang dynasty more than three thousand years ago, whose diviners scratched the earliest Chinese characters onto ox bones and turtle shells. In 221 BCE the king of Qin forged the warring states into the first empire, standardised the script, the coinage, and even the axle-width of carts, began the Great Wall, and was buried with the terracotta army; the country's name for itself, the Middle Kingdom, comes from this imperial self-understanding. The Han dynasty that followed was so defining that the majority people still carry its name. Across the Tang, Song, Ming, and the final Qing, one idea held firm: that society is ordered by the ethics Confucius set out around 500 BCE, with duty flowing upward from son to father and subject to ruler, and that the state should be run by scholars chosen on merit. For some thirteen hundred years officials were picked through the imperial examination, a punishing written test on the Confucian classics, which fixed into the culture a reverence for learning and the written word that has never left it. Buddhism arrived along the Silk Road and settled beside the native Daoism.

The modern state and the secular order

The empire fell in 1911, and in 1949 the Communist Party founded the People's Republic. Under Mao the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 set out to smash the 'four olds', old customs, culture, habits, and ideas, striking at temples, texts, and tradition directly. From 1978 Deng Xiaoping turned the country toward market reform, and in the decades since, several hundred million people have moved from the countryside into the cities and China has grown into the world's second-largest economy. The state stays officially atheist and Party-led, recognising five religions, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism, and overseeing them through state associations, while folk religion, ancestor worship, and fortune belief carry on widely below the official line. Two structures shape ordinary life in particular. The household registration system, hukou, ties a person's schooling and services to their registered home town and has long divided rural citizens from urban ones. And the one-child policy, enforced from 1980 to 2015, bent the population itself, leaving far more men than women in the generation born under it and an ageing society now short of young workers, a strain the later turn to two and then three children has not undone.

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Face

Two kinds of face

Chinese keeps two separate words where English has one. Lian is moral face, the integrity and decency that any respectable person is assumed to hold; to lose lian is to be exposed as having broken a moral standard, and the charge of being 'without lian', shameless, is among the harshest things one person can say to another. Mianzi is prestige face, the standing that comes from achievement, wealth, position, and connections. Where lian is a floor that a decent person simply keeps, mianzi is a quantity that can be built up over a life, put on display, lent to others, and spent down. A person may carry great mianzi and little lian, a powerful figure of doubtful character, or solid lian and modest mianzi, an honest person of no rank. Most of what follows turns on mianzi, the social kind, which is the one in constant circulation between people.

Giving, losing, and saving it

Face moves between people, and a great deal of conduct is the moving of it. To give face, gei mianzi, is to raise another's standing in front of others: by deferring to them, praising them in public, accepting their invitation, drinking a toast they offer, or letting them have the last word. To lose face is to be cut down where others can see: criticised, contradicted, corrected, refused, or shown to have failed in the open. Because face lives in the eyes of onlookers, the same setback in private costs far less than the same setback in public, and a humiliation that others witness is the true injury. Saving face is the work of arranging matters so that no one is openly diminished, through an indirect word, a go-between who carries the hard message, a correction made quietly, or an exit left open for the other side to take. Giving face also creates a debt, since the person raised is now under obligation, and this is the point where face feeds directly into the relationship network of guanxi.

How face runs the day

The rule against making anyone lose face shapes ordinary conduct from the top down. Criticism is delivered in private and through hints rather than in the open, and a manager who dresses a subordinate down in front of others is judged to have behaved badly, while the subordinate keeps the sympathy of the room. A flat 'no' is avoided, since a direct refusal takes face from both sides at once; reluctance arrives instead as 'maybe', 'that might be inconvenient', 'I will think about it', or plain silence, and a newcomer who hears agreement in those words has misread them. The banquet and the gift run partly on face: a host gains face by hosting lavishly and gives face to the guests by the act, an expensive gift confers face on the receiver, and refusing an invitation or a gift outright can take face away from the one who offered. Conspicuous spending, on brand names, on the dinner bill seized before anyone else can pay it, on the scale of a wedding, is face made visible. And because a family shares one face, a child's success, a place at a top university, a good job, a strong marriage, gives the parents face, while a child's visible failure takes it, which is part of why the pressure to perform runs so heavy through Chinese families.

The cost and the contest

Face carries a price. The spending it drives, on weddings, banquets, bride price, and gifts exchanged by families determined not to be outdone, is a real and sometimes ruinous burden, and the same logic reaches into government, where the term 'face project' names a showy public work built more for prestige than for use. Face-saving costs candour as well: a subordinate who will not carry bad news upward, or a partner who agrees to a plan rather than raise an objection, can let a real problem run unspoken until it has grown too large to contain. Younger and urban Chinese, more exposed to blunter foreign habits of speech, push against some of this, and direct talk is easier among close friends and online than across rank. The habit underneath has not gone away. In almost any setting that carries weight, people still track closely whose face is being given and whose is being put at risk.

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Guanxi

More than networking

Guanxi means, plainly, 'relationships', but the word carries a weight that 'contacts' or 'networking' does not. A relationship of guanxi is a standing bond of mutual obligation: a favour done is a debt, remembered as renqing, human feeling, that the other party is expected to repay when called upon, perhaps years later. The bond is personal and long-lived, and strong guanxi carries genuine warmth, ganqing, alongside the obligation, so that it is felt as friendship and not only as accounting. A foreign businessperson who treats guanxi as a contact list misreads it: the relationship is the asset itself, and the deal follows from it. Trust is placed in the person well before it is placed in any contract, and a signed contract among parties with no relationship is regarded as a far weaker thing than a handshake among parties who have one.

The circles of obligation

Guanxi rests on a sharp division between those inside a person's circle and those outside it. Chinese social life has long been pictured as a set of rings spreading like the ripples from a stone dropped in water, with the self at the centre and obligation thinning with each ring outward: family at the core, then the familiar people, shuren, the friends, classmates, colleagues, and contacts one knows, and beyond them the strangers, shengren, to whom little is owed. The warmth, trust, and duty a person gives to insiders can sit right beside near-indifference to those outside the rings, which is how the same individual can be tender with kin and unyielding toward a stranger in a queue. A stranger is drawn inward only by being introduced, fed, and bound through favours over time, and the surest route in is a trusted go-between who vouches for the newcomer, because the introducer lends the newcomer a share of the trust already invested in himself.

How things get done through it

Much of what a person needs in China moves along these lines rather than through formal channels: a job, a hospital bed, a place at a good school, a business licence, a contract, a quiet word that settles a problem with officialdom. Business has long followed the relationship rather than preceding it, with banquets, gifts, and time spent building the bond before terms are raised, since the bond is what makes the dealing safe. Using a connection to slip around a rule or a queue has its own name, 'going through the back door'. Turned on officials, the same giving runs into the grey zone where a favour or a gift shades into a bribe, a line that is genuinely blurred and that the anti-corruption drive since 2012 has tried to redraw, chilling much of the old official banqueting and gift-giving in the process. Keeping guanxi alive is steady labour in itself: the gifts at festivals, the banquets attended, the calls returned, the appearances made, all of it holding the relationship warm against the day it is needed.

The burden and the contest

The obligation runs both ways and can weigh heavily. A request from someone inside a person's guanxi is hard to refuse, since turning it down costs both face and the relationship, so people find themselves bound to help relatives and contacts at real expense to themselves. As a system it rewards the well-connected and leaves those without strong networks behind, which sets it against the ideals of equal treatment, open competition, and the rule of law on which a modern economy is built. Multinationals, professional hiring, and rule-based institutions have worn down the purest forms of guanxi, and the anti-corruption campaign has made officials warier of the old exchanges. None of this has displaced it. In ordinary life and across much of business, who a person knows, and what they and that person have done for one another, still decides a great deal of what happens.

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Family, age, and the group

Filial piety, the first duty

The duty a child owes a parent sits at the centre of Chinese family life and has done so for more than two thousand years, taught as the root of all other virtues. In its plain form it means obeying and honouring your parents while they live, caring for them when they are old, and remembering them after they die. A grown son or daughter is expected to support ageing parents in the home rather than send them elsewhere, and to put the parents' wishes high among their own plans. The respect runs by age throughout the family: elders speak first, are served first at the table, and are deferred to in decisions, and a younger person addresses an older relative by their exact place in the family, with separate words for a father's older brother and a mother's younger brother, so that the rank is named every time they are spoken to. Obedience to the old is felt as the proper order of things, not as a burden imposed from outside.

The family before the person

A person's choices are weighed for what they mean to the family, not only to themselves. Honour and shame are shared: one member's success lifts the whole family's standing, and one member's disgrace stains it, so the family has a stake in how each of its own behaves. The large decisions of a life, what to study, what work to take, whom to marry, where to live, are made with the parents and not around them, and going against them is a serious step rather than a private right. Children carry a debt for being raised and are expected to repay it across their whole lives, in money sent home, in care given, and in the family name carried well. This is why the pressure on a child to do well at school and to succeed runs so deep: a child's achievement is the family's, and so is a child's failure.

Marriage as a family matter

Because marriage joins families and continues the line, it has never been left wholly to the couple. Parents take a hand in it, and in cities older couples still gather in parks at weekend 'marriage markets', pinning up notes that advertise a grown child's age, height, income, and flat in the hope of a match. A man's family is expected to provide a home and a sum of money to the bride's side, and the cost of securing a son's marriage can fall heavily on his parents. Daughters who reach their late twenties unmarried meet a sharp and wounding label that brands them as left over, even as many young women now choose study and work first. The wedding itself, large and richly spent on, is as much the two families' event as the couple's, and the standing of both is read in its scale.

The one-child years and what they left

For about thirty-five years, from 1980 until 2015, most couples were allowed only one child, and that single rule has reshaped the family it acted on. A generation grew up as only children, each one the sole focus of two parents and four grandparents, indulged enough to earn the nickname 'little emperors' and burdened enough that one grown child may now carry the care of six elders alone. The old preference for a son, set against the one-child limit, led many families to make sure their one child was a boy, and the country now holds millions more young men than young women, with many unable to find a wife. The rule was eased to two children and then three, but the habit of the small, costly, much-invested family has held, and China has slipped into a steep fall in births and a fast-ageing population. The duty of the young to the old remains, but there are fewer young to carry it.

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Ancestors and death

The dead who stay in the family

Long before Buddhism or Daoism reached China, families honoured their ancestors, and they have never stopped. The dead are thought to carry on in another form, still watching over their descendants and still in need of care, and a family that tends them well is blessed by them in return. Many homes keep a small shrine with the names of the forebears written on tablets, where incense is lit and food, tea, or wine is set out on their days, and the eldest son carries the chief duty of keeping this up. The same belief is why having a son matters so deeply: it is the son who continues the family name and who tends the ancestors after his parents are gone, so that to die without a son is to risk being forgotten and left hungry. This care for the dead is filial duty stretched beyond death, the child still serving the parent.

A Chinese funeral

White, not black, is the colour of mourning, worn in plain cloth or sackcloth by the close family, and a funeral is a loud and crowded event rather than a quiet one, since a poor turnout would shame the dead and the living both. Much of what is done is meant to provide for the dead in the next life: paper models of money, houses, cars, and other goods are burned so the dead receive them, and real food is offered before the coffin. The body is watched over, firecrackers and music may mark the procession, and white envelopes of money help the family meet the heavy cost. How well a family buries its elder is read as a measure of its respect, so funerals, like weddings, are spent on beyond easy means. The rites draw on old beliefs about the soul more than on any single religion, and many families fold in Buddhist or Daoist prayers as they see fit.

The days for the dead

Two times of the year belong to the ancestors. At Qingming, the grave-sweeping festival in early spring, families travel back to their home places to clean the graves of their forebears, pull the weeds, lay out food and drink, burn paper money and incense, and bow before the headstone, and the roads and trains fill with people returning to do it. In the seventh month of the old calendar comes the Hungry Ghost month, when the gates between the worlds are believed to open and the dead walk among the living; families burn offerings and leave out food for their own ancestors and for the wandering, uncared-for ghosts who have no family to feed them, and people avoid weddings, swimming, and travel at night while the gates stand open. Between these, the dead are remembered again at the new year, brought into the family's most important festival.

Burial, ashes, and the state

By old custom a body should be buried whole, in a good spot chosen with care for the lie of the land and water, so that the ancestor rests well and the family prospers; a fortunate grave was thought to bless the descendants for generations. Against this the modern state has pushed hard for cremation, to save farmland and stamp out what it treats as superstition, and across much of the country burial in the ground is now restricted or banned and cremation required, with the ashes kept in a hall or a small plot. The pull between the two is real, and in some rural places families have resisted the order to cremate. The deeper habit holds even where the grave has changed: the dead are still visited, still fed, and still counted as part of the family they came from.

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Harmony and the unspoken

Keeping the peace

The wish to keep relations smooth runs old and deep, and it sits behind a preference for agreement on the surface even when feelings underneath are mixed. To force an argument into the open, to make someone admit they are wrong in front of others, or to push a disagreement to its end is felt as crude and damaging, because it costs face on every side and leaves a wound in the relationship that lasts. People would rather leave a thing unsettled, smooth it over, or let it quietly drop than win it outright. A go-between is often brought in to carry a hard message or settle a quarrel, so that the two sides never have to clash face to face. None of this means there is no anger or disagreement; it means the showing of it in the open is held back, kept for private settings or close kin, where the cost is lower.

The refusal that is never said

Because a flat 'no' turns someone down to their face, it is mostly avoided, and a person learns to refuse without the word. A request is met instead with 'maybe', 'I will see', 'that could be difficult', a change of subject, a long pause, or a vague promise to look into it, and all of these, in the right setting, mean no. The same softness covers bad news and disagreement: rather than say a plan is poor, a person might praise a small part of it and go quiet on the rest, or raise a worry as a question. A visitor who takes the words at their surface and hears a yes will be misled, while someone who knows the place reads the hesitation, the indirectness, and the things politely not said, and understands. Silence itself carries meaning, and is often the clearest answer of all.

Modesty and the turned-aside compliment

Speaking well of oneself is frowned on, and so is taking a compliment head-on. Praise is met with denial: a cook told the meal was wonderful will call it plain and poorly made, a host who has laid on a feast will apologise that there is nothing worth eating, and a parent praised for a clever child will play the child down. To agree with praise would be to grab face in front of others and seem to boast, so the graceful move is to push it away. The same modesty shapes how gifts and invitations are handled, with an offer refused once or twice for politeness before it is accepted, and the giver pressing it again, so that neither side appears greedy or grasping. A newcomer who takes the first refusal as final has missed the dance.

Where the smoothness gives way

The calm surface has its limits and its costs. Among close family and old friends, where the relationship can take the strain, people speak far more bluntly than the careful public manner would suggest. In a crowd of strangers, who sit outside the circles of obligation, the restraint can fall away entirely, and a dispute in a market or a snarl of traffic can turn loud and sharp in a moment. The habit of smoothing things over also hides real problems, since a worker who will not contradict a boss, or a partner who agrees rather than object, can let a fault run on unmentioned until it is too big to ignore. Younger people raised on blunter talk push against the old indirectness, yet in any setting that touches face or rank, the careful, peace-keeping manner still mostly holds.

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Belief and the unseen

Belief without membership

For most of China's long history, three teachings sat side by side and were felt to fit together rather than to compete. The way of Confucius gave the rules for how to live and how a family and a country should be ordered. Daoism, born in China, taught a way of living in balance with nature and the unseen, and carried its own priests, immortals, and charms. Buddhism, which came in along the Silk Road, brought the idea of rebirth, the working of past deeds upon a present life, and the gentle goddess of mercy, Guanyin, to whom people pray for children and for protection. A single person draws on all three as the day calls for it, and it is often said that a Chinese man is Confucian at his work, Daoist in his leisure, and Buddhist as he nears death. The worship itself is a plain exchange: a person brings incense and offerings and asks a god for a favour, and comes back to give thanks if the favour is granted.

The crowded heaven

The old gods are many, and most of them stand close to ordinary life rather than far above it. The Kitchen God watches over the household through the year and rises near the new year to report on it to heaven, so the family smears his paper image with something sweet and sticky to soften his words. Fierce Door Gods are pasted on the doors to turn away evil, the God of Wealth is welcomed in at the new year, and the sea goddess Mazu is prayed to all along the southern coast. A loyal general from the old wars, Guan Yu, red-faced and bearded, is honoured alike by soldiers, by police, and by businessmen as a guardian of loyalty and good luck. People come to the temples to make their requests with incense and offerings, to shake a numbered stick from a cup for a reading of their fortune, or to drop a pair of curved wooden blocks on the floor and tell from the way they land whether a god has answered yes or no.

Luck, numbers, and the lie of a place

Fortune is read closely in numbers, in colours, and in the arrangement of a space. The number eight is prized because it sounds like the word for wealth, and people will pay dearly for a telephone number, a car plate, or a flat numbered with eights; the Beijing Olympics were opened at eight minutes past eight in the evening on the eighth day of the eighth month. The number four is shunned because it sounds like the word for death, so many buildings have no fourth or fourteenth floor at all. Red is the colour of luck and joy and fills every wedding and new year, while white and black belong to death. The placing of a house, a door, an office, or a grave is judged by feng shui, the reading of wind and water, to set it in keeping with the flow of fortune, and builders and businesses will consult it before they break ground or open their doors. Each person carries one of the twelve animals of the zodiac, fixed by the year of their birth, and the year of one's own animal is held to be unlucky, met by wearing red against it. The same care touches gifts, so that a clock is never given, since to give a clock sounds like seeing someone to their death, and a single pear is not split between friends, since to share out a pear sounds like parting.

Belief and the state

The state is atheist and led by a party whose members are not to hold a religion, and it permits five faiths, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and the Catholic and Protestant churches, to be practised through bodies that it oversees, while worship outside these is held in check. During the Cultural Revolution, temples, shrines, and old texts were smashed as the leavings of a backward past, and a great deal was lost. Since the country opened in the 1980s, belief has come flooding back: temples have been rebuilt and fill again on festival days, fortune-telling and feng shui thrive, and the old household worship carries on quietly in millions of homes. The government largely lets folk practice and Buddhism and Daoism alone as part of the culture, while keeping a close watch on organised religion, on faith bound up with ethnic identity in places such as Tibet and Xinjiang, and on any movement it judges to be a rival for people's loyalty.

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The table and the toast

Where everyone sits

At a formal meal the seating is not loose, and where a person is placed says plainly how they rank. Diners gather around a round table, often with a turning glass tray at the centre that carries the dishes, and the seat of honour is the one that faces the door, taken by the most senior guest, with the next in rank to either side and the lesser places running down toward the door. The host sits nearest the entrance, in the humblest spot, the place from which the serving and the paying are managed. The host orders for the table and sees that the best of each dish reaches the honoured guest first, sometimes lifting it onto their plate, and the table is filled with far more food than can be eaten, because a board that empties would shame the host as mean. To clear every dish can suggest the host gave too little, so a little is left behind.

The toasts and the drinking

Drink binds the table, and the toasts follow an order of their own. The host opens with a toast to the whole table, and from there toasts pass around, offered to one person or to all, with a word of thanks or good wishes before each. The call of ganbei, 'dry the cup', asks the other to empty it in one swallow, and to clink lower than another's glass is a quiet way of placing yourself below them in respect, so people dip their rims in a small contest of humility. A guest is toasted often and is expected to answer in kind, and refusing to drink at all can read as holding back from the warmth of the table, though a soft drink is accepted for those who will not take alcohol. Much of the real business of a banquet, the bonds made and the trust built, is done over these rounds rather than in plain words.

The fight to pay

When the meal ends a struggle begins over the bill, and it is meant to be fought. To pay is to give face and to show care for the others, so guests reach for the bill, press money on the host, and may slip away to settle it in secret, while the host wards them all off and insists the meal is theirs to cover. Splitting the bill evenly, the ordinary way among friends in the West, is rare and can seem cold, since one person paying the whole is the act that builds the bond and lays down a favour to be returned another day, when the other will fight just as hard to pay in turn. An invitation to eat carries this with it: the one who invites is the one who pays, and a guest who lets the host win graciously, then hosts them next time, keeps the exchange in good order.

Tea, and the tap of thanks

Tea runs through the meal and through ordinary visits, poured for others before oneself and kept topped up as a steady courtesy, with the youngest or most junior often taking up the pot to serve the rest. When someone fills your cup, the table answer is to tap two fingers lightly on the wood beside it, a small bow of thanks made without breaking the talk, said to recall an emperor who travelled in disguise and whose companions could not kneel to him without giving him away. A pot whose lid is turned or left ajar is the quiet signal to a teahouse that it wants refilling. These small motions, the pouring, the tapping, the topping up, are courtesy made visible, the same care that the seating and the toasting carry in larger form.

The gift and the red envelope

A guest rarely arrives empty-handed, and the gift, like the meal, is weighed for what it says. Fruit, good tea, drink, or something from the visitor's home region is welcome, wrapped well and ideally in red, the colour of luck, while white and black wrapping belong to mourning. A gift is often refused once or twice for politeness before it is taken, and the giver presses it again, so neither side seems grasping. Some gifts are never given at all, for the sound of their names: a clock, because to give one echoes the words for seeing a person to their death, and a shared pear, because to split it echoes the word for parting. At weddings, the new year, and births, the gift takes the form of money in a red envelope, the hongbao, the colour carrying luck and the sum chosen as an even, auspicious figure that steers clear of the number four. The envelope passes from married to unmarried, from elder to child, and from host to staff, and it is given and received with both hands.

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The festival year

The Spring Festival

The new year of the old calendar, known as the Spring Festival, is by far the most important time of the year, and it sets off the largest movement of people on earth, as hundreds of millions travel from the cities where they work back to the home towns and parents they left. The days before are spent cleaning the house to sweep out the old year's bad luck, pasting red banners of good wishes beside the doors, and settling debts so the year starts clean. The heart of it is the meal on new year's eve, when the whole family gathers and dishes are chosen for the luck in their names, a whole fish for abundance, dumplings shaped like old gold ingots for wealth, eaten late into the night. Doors and windows wear red and gold, firecrackers and fireworks drive off bad spirits and ill fortune, children and the unmarried are given red envelopes of money, and the celebrating runs on for days of visiting elders and relatives in order of seniority.

Lanterns to close it

The new-year season does not end at once but runs about a fortnight, drawing to its close on the night of the first full moon, the Lantern Festival. Red lanterns are hung and carried through the streets, riddles are pinned to them for passers-by to solve, and in many places lion and dragon dances wind through the crowds to drums and cymbals. The food of the night is a small round dumpling of glutinous rice, its roundness standing for the full moon and for the family made whole and complete, eaten warm in a sweet soup. With the lanterns lit and the last of the family feasting done, the long new-year holiday is finished and ordinary life and work begin again.

The days for the dead and the dragon boats

In early spring comes Qingming, the grave-sweeping festival, when families travel back to tend the graves of their ancestors, clearing the weeds, laying out food and drink, and burning paper money and incense before the headstones. Early in the summer follows the Dragon Boat Festival, remembered for a loyal poet of the old kingdoms who drowned himself in a river in despair, whose people are said to have raced out in boats to save him and thrown rice into the water so the fish would eat that instead of his body. The day is marked still by races of long narrow boats carved as dragons, paddled hard to the beat of a drum, and by eating zongzi, parcels of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves, the same offering cast into the river all those years ago.

The harvest moon

In the middle of autumn, on the night the full moon is brightest, comes the Mid-Autumn Festival, second only to the Spring Festival in feeling. Families gather again, this time to sit out under the moon together, and where they cannot be in the same place they look on the one moon from afar as a way of being together across the distance, the round moon standing for the family made whole. The food of the night is the mooncake, a dense round pastry filled with sweet lotus-seed paste or red bean and often a salted egg yolk at the centre for the moon, cut into small wedges and shared around so that everyone has a piece. Mooncakes are carried as gifts in the weeks before, passed between families, friends, and firms as a token of regard, so that the festival, like the others, runs on gathering and on giving.

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Food: region and meaning

The wheat north and the rice south

The oldest line drawn across Chinese food runs between north and south, set by what the land will grow. The colder, drier north grows wheat, so its tables are built on noodles, steamed breads, dumplings, and pancakes, with heartier, saltier cooking and a fondness for onion, garlic, and vinegar. The warmer, wetter south grows rice, which anchors nearly every southern meal, eaten plain alongside dishes of vegetables, fish, and meat. The divide carries into the bowl in front of you: where a northerner may fill up on dumplings or hand-pulled noodles, a southerner expects a bowl of rice, and the two have long traded gentle teasing about which is the proper way to eat. This single split, wheat above and rice below, sits under the more particular regional styles that grew up across the country.

The great regional kitchens

Within the north and south, a handful of regional ways of cooking stand out, each shaped by its climate and its produce. The food of Sichuan in the west is the one most known for heat, built on chillies and on a peppercorn that leaves the mouth tingling and numb, in dishes layered with bold, spicy, mouth-filling flavour. Cantonese cooking in the far south, the style that travelled abroad with southern migrants and so became the Chinese food much of the world first met, prizes freshness and lightness, gentle steaming and stir-frying that let the true taste of fish and vegetable come through, and it gave the world the small steamed and fried plates of dim sum, taken with tea. Eastern cooking around Shanghai leans sweeter and richer, fond of soy, sugar, and rice wine, while the spicy food of Hunan runs hotter and more sour than even Sichuan's. Each region holds its own way as the finest.

The shared table

A Chinese meal is eaten together from common dishes, not parcelled out onto separate plates. The dishes are set in the centre, often on a turning tray, and each person takes a little at a time into their own rice bowl with chopsticks, reaching back for more as they go, so that a table of several people will order several dishes to share rather than one each. The balance of a meal matters: a good spread sets meat against vegetable, rich against plain, and aims for a harmony across the whole table rather than a single star dish. Rice or noodles fill out the meal, soup is often drunk toward the end rather than the start, and tea runs alongside. Eating from the shared centre, taking the best pieces for others before oneself, is itself an act of care, and a host or elder will often place a choice morsel into a guest's bowl.

The meaning in a dish

Much Chinese food is eaten for what it stands for as well as for its taste, above all at festivals and weddings. A whole fish is served at the new year because its name sounds like the word for surplus, for plenty left over into the year ahead, and it is often left partly uneaten to make the point. Long noodles, never cut short, are eaten at birthdays for a long life, so to chop them is to cut a life short. New-year dumplings are folded into the shape of the old gold ingots they hope to bring, and the round dumplings and mooncakes of the lantern and autumn nights stand for the full moon and the family made whole. Sweet sticky cake at the new year carries a wish to rise higher in the year to come, and red dates, lotus seeds, and peanuts are pressed on a new bride for the sons they are wished to bring. The dish is the wish, set out on the table to be eaten into being.

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Work and business

The bond before the bargain

A deal in China tends to follow a relationship rather than to begin one. Where a foreign firm may expect to meet, agree terms, and sign, a Chinese counterpart will want first to know the person across the table, through shared meals, small favours, and time spent, since the trust between people is what makes the dealing safe. The banquet does much of this work, the seating and the toasts and the fight over the bill building the bond that the contract later rests on, so a signed page among parties with no relationship is held to be a weaker thing than a firm understanding among parties who have one. An introduction from a trusted go-between, who lends a newcomer a share of the standing already invested in himself, opens doors that a cold approach cannot. Patience is part of it, and pressing for a quick close before the relationship is made can set the whole thing back.

Rank and the boss's word

The workplace is ordered by rank, and the order is plain in how people behave. The senior person decides, is greeted and seated first, is handed the business card with both hands and a slight bow, and is seldom argued with in front of others. Decisions tend to travel up to the top and come back down rather than be settled across a table of equals, which can make matters slow to a visitor used to flatter ways of working. A junior who openly contradicts a superior is thought to have behaved badly, so disagreement is carried in private or hinted at sideways, and titles and seniority are minded closely in who speaks, who is served, and who is deferred to. The same respect for age and place that runs through the family runs through the firm.

What is said and not said

Much of the real meaning at work is carried below the words. A flat refusal is avoided, so a 'maybe', a drawing of breath, a remark that something might be difficult, or a quiet change of subject is often a no, and a visitor who hears agreement in those words will be misled. Praise of a plan may hide a worry left politely unspoken, and a subordinate may agree to a task rather than raise the objection that would cost the boss face, so that a problem can run on unmentioned until it grows too large to hide. Reading these signals, the hesitation, the indirectness, the thing not quite said, is part of working well in China, and pressing someone to commit outright in front of others can corner them into a yes they do not mean. Business cards, gifts, and seating are all handled with the same care for face that the rest of life carries.

The modern workplace

On top of these older habits sits a hard and fast-moving working world. In the technology firms and big cities a punishing schedule became common enough to earn a shorthand for it, nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week, and long hours and fierce competition are widely felt, with the young pressed to outdo one another for a shrinking number of good posts. State-owned firms and family businesses run on connections and seniority in the older way, while foreign companies and start-ups work flatter, faster, and more by merit, so a young Chinese worker may move between two quite different worlds of work in a single career. Some among the young have begun to push back against the grind, talking of doing the bare minimum or stepping off the race altogether, even as the weight of family hopes pulls the other way. The old forces have not gone; they share the office now with new ones.

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