‘Back in business’ — Phrase of the week #100
The return of Sinica evokes an expression from Chinese literary bandits of old, and of modern-day entrepreneurial grit.
Our phrase of the week is: Back in business (重出江湖 chóngchū jiānghú).
Context
Welcome to Phrase of the Week.
This is a special edition of the column for two reasons.
First, it's the 100th Phrase of the Week, which until November last year was published on The China Project. Second, this is the first Phrase published from our new home, the Sinica Substack.
Ushering in a new chapter, we've taken a different approach for this first post. Instead of exploring the meaning behind a phrase used in China to talk about the news of the week, we chose a phrase from the archive which best describes the biggest story in the China watching world this week:
The return of Sinica!
Looking back over the last hundred phrases, a common theme is “comebacks” — the return of indomitable Chinese entrepreneurs against all odds.
Like Yú Mǐnhóng 俞敏洪, the founder of the education group New Oriental. He was described as China’s unluckiest entrepreneur of 2021, after the Double Reduction Policy decimated his billion dollar extracurricular education business.
Within one year, Yu had made a remarkable comeback with a pivot to livestream ecommerce.
His return was described as a "salted fish that flipped itself over" (咸鱼翻身 xiányú fānshēn), or "back from the dead."
In August 2023, Luckin Coffee "rose from the ashes like a phoenix" (浴火重生 yùhuǒ chóngshēng), when it overtook Starbucks as China's largest coffee chain. Just three years before, the disgraced company had to delist from the New York Stock Exchange, was fined $180 million, and its management team and founder were sacked.
But these remarkable comebacks don't quite reflect the return of Sinica to our podcast feed and inboxes.
Kaiser Kuo is not a salted fish, nor a sizzling phoenix.
Instead, Sinica’s comeback is similar to how the return of China's biggest livestreamer, Austin Li 李佳琦, was described last September after a three month hiatus: He was "back in business" (重出江湖 chóngchū jiānghú).
So this is how we would describe Sinica’s comeback:
After three months of hiatus, the Sinica podcast is back in business!
停播休整三个多月后,Sinica播客终于重出江湖
tíngbō xiūzhěng sāngeduōyuè hòu, Sinica bōkè zhōngyú chóngchū jiānghú.
And with that we have our first Sinica Phrase of the Week!
What it means
When Austin Li remerged, the idiom-like four-character phrase used to describe it translates as "emerge again" (重出 chóngchū), and "rivers and lakes" (江湖 jiānghú).
“Rivers and lakes” is a metaphor with many meanings in Chinese, and most are not related to water.
Its earliest appearances are in the works of Zhuāngzǐ 庄子, an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century B.C., for whom "rivers and lakes" meant society, similar to the phrase, "all under heaven" (天下 tiānxià).
By the time of the Eastern Jin dynasty (A.D. 317–420), “rivers and lakes” described being “on the fringes of or outside society.”
One of China’s greatest poets, Táo Yuānmíng 陶渊明, who lived at that time used the phrase. Tao himself was a hermit.
He refers to “rivers and lakes” to mean “on the fringes of society” in the poem, Bidding Farewell to Yin Jin’an (与殷晋安别) written in 411 AD:
Talented people like you will have a bright future serving the court,
While poor people like me choose to live in seclusion away from society.
良才不隐世,江湖多贱贫 。
Liángcái bù yǐnshì, jiānghú duō jiànpín.
By the 20th-century, over one millenia later, “rivers and lakes” had come to mean the criminal underworld. One of the great novelists of last century, Lǎo Shě 老舍, used it with this connotation.
Nowadays, the phrase can still mean any one of these things, and more, depending on the context. But in modern Chinese, it usually means "the business world."
So our Phrase of the Week can be translated as “re-emerge,” be "back on the streets," or, "back in business."
Sinica, and Phrase of the Week, are not only back in business, but here to stay!
See you next week.
Andrew Methven is the author of Slow Chinese 每周漫闻, a resource to help learners of Chinese maintain and improve their language skills, and keep on top of the latest language trends in China. Read more.