Cha bu duo meaning12/8/2023 ![]() On occasion, it was applauded as ‘peasant’ science or Stakhanovite virtue, but more often it meant trouble if noticed by a superior, since Maoism often matched the call for revolution with a pedantic insistence on the correct routine, especially in the factory or the farm. One of the daily necessities of life under Maoism was improvisation finding ways to keep irreplaceable luxuries such as tractors or machine tools going, despite missing parts or broken supply chains. Yet sometimes there’s a brilliance to chabuduo. China is the land of the cut corner, of ‘good enough for government work’. Chabuduo implies that to put any more time or effort into a piece of work would be the act of a fool. Chabuduo is the corrosive opposite of the impulse towards craftmanship, the desire, as the sociologist Richard Sennett writes in The Craftsman (2008), ‘to reject muddling through, to reject the job just good enough’. It’s a phrase you’ll hear with grating regularity, one that speaks to a job 70 per cent done, a plan sketched out but never completed, a gauge unchecked or a socket put in the wrong size. (And, after losing the card for my master movers, the next time I shifted house, the moving team did a fine imitation of the Three Stooges.) Instead, the prevailing attitude is chabuduo, or ‘close enough’. When I moved house some years ago, I watched with genuine delight as three wiry men stripped my old apartment to the bone in 10 minutes, casually balancing sofas and desks on their backs and packing the van as tightly as a master Tetris player.īut such scenes are an unusual treat. To see somebody doing a job well, not just for its own reward, but for the satisfaction of good work, thrills my heart it doesn’t matter whether it’s cooking or candle-making or fixing a bike. My time in China has taught me the pleasure and value of craftsmanship, simply because it’s so rare. Most of the time, when I’ve called in help, I’ve been left standing in a flooded bathroom with a panicked 20-year-old assuring me that he thinks he can get the pipe back on. I barely qualify as wealthy, even in China, and artisans are few and preciously guarded. I am a believer in Hilaire Belloc’s 1911 epigram: It is the business of the wealthy man To give employment to the artisan. The shower is not placed next to the apartment’s central wiring and protected by nothing more than rotting drywall. ![]() None of the lightbulbs have ever exploded and the mirror merely broke away, rather than falling spontaneously from the frame. ![]() The sockets do not flash blue sparks when plugged in, and all but two work. Our toilet works, while in many of my friends’ houses, flushing the loo is a hydraulic operation akin to controlling the Nile floods. By Chinese standards, it’s far better than the average. On the steps outside our door, I duck my head every day to avoid the thick tangle of hanging wires that brings power and the internet when the wind is up, connections slow as cables swing. In the bedroom, the ceiling-high air-conditioning unit runs its moisture through a hole knocked in the wall, stuffed with an old cloth to avoid leakage, while the balcony door, its sealant rotted, has a towel handy to block the rain when it pours through. Each of our light fittings takes a different bulb, and a quarter of them are permanently broken. The mirror on my wardrobe came off its hinges six months ago and is now propped up against the wall, one of many furnishing casualties. In our apartment in central Beijing, we fight a daily rearguard action against entropy.
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