In our apartment in central Beijing, we resist collapse every day like a small defensive army. Not dramatic collapse, not the kind that arrives with sirens and smoke, but the quiet loosening inside ordinary life: the mirror that detached itself from the wardrobe door and has leaned against the wall for half a year, as if only taking a temporary rest; the light fittings that refuse to share a common bulb, each demanding its own obscure species, while several remain permanently on strike above our heads; the tall bedroom air-conditioner that drains condensation through a roughly smashed hole in the wall, plugged with an old rag like some piece of domestic hydraulic engineering; the balcony door whose sealant has long since decayed, so that every heavy rain turns the room into a defensive position, towels ready for deployment.
Outside the door there is not much consolation. Each morning I lower my head beneath a sagging knot of wires. They carry electricity and internet, and also remind you that the visible modernity of a city is often held together by a few swinging cables. When the wind rises, the wires move, and the connection hesitates with them, as though the internet were not sustained by servers and fibre optics but by the mood of the weather.
The apartment is not old. It is only a few years into its life. More dispiritingly, by local standards it is quite good. The toilet flushes, and does not require the kind of hydraulic judgement one might bring to managing the Yellow River. Most of the sockets work, and plugging something in does not reliably produce a blue flash. The bulbs fail often enough, but none has exploded over our heads. The mirror came loose, but at least it did not fall on anyone. The shower is not installed directly beside the central wiring and protected only by damp, moulding board. In other words, we are lucky.
I have always liked Belloc’s old-fashioned little injunction: it is the business of the wealthy man to give employment to the artisan. The difficulty is that I am not especially wealthy, not wealthy enough at least to summon true artisans at will, and true artisans here are scarce enough to seem almost legendary. Much of the time, calling for repairs means inviting a young man to crouch on an already flooded floor, stare anxiously at a pipe, and then tell you in the tone of someone encouraging himself that he thinks he can probably make it work.
For precisely that reason, my years in China have taught me to value craft. Not the kind of craft lit by museum spotlights, nor the romantic craft of a promotional film in which someone sands wood in slow motion, but the simple ability to do something correctly, well and securely. To watch a cook cut cleanly, a bicycle repairman diagnose a sound, or a mover rotate a wardrobe through a narrow stairwell without panic is enough to produce in me something close to reverence. Years ago, when I moved apartments, I watched three lean, strong men empty a room in little more than ten minutes. Sofas, desks and boxes seemed to attach naturally to their backs and shoulders; the van was packed with the exactness of a perfect game of Tetris. I almost wanted to applaud.
Such moments are rare. I later lost the phone number of that moving team, and the next crew demonstrated, through lateness, shouting and repeated collisions with walls, that excellence does not appear automatically. The more common spirit is chabuduo.
Chabuduo is a gentle phrase, almost too gentle to justify immediate anger. It is not open sabotage, and not quite admitted neglect. It is a loose default position: the door is crooked, chabuduo; the wire is exposed, chabuduo; the size is wrong, chabuduo; the pipe leaks a little, chabuduo; the plan is 70 per cent finished, chabuduo; the gauge has not been checked, chabuduo; a few screws are missing, chabuduo. It is not the confession of failure, but the domestication of failure.
The essence of craftsmanship is a refusal of “good enough”. A person who truly knows how to work is troubled by an uneven edge, disturbed by a joint that does not meet cleanly, aware that spending ten more minutes to finish something properly is not stupidity but part of dignity. Chabuduo says the opposite. It treats extra effort as waste, precision as affectation, completion as something negotiable. Why bother? If it works, isn’t that enough?
But the matter is not simple. Sometimes chabuduo has its own kind of genius. In periods of shortage, rigid institutions and missing parts, improvisation is not laziness but survival. Among older generations there is a genuine and astonishing ability to make do: a pair of pliers, two lengths of wire and a roll of tape can keep a machine alive that should have died years ago. The lock is broken? No need to buy a new one; loop some wire through it and it will hold for now. The pump has failed? Cannibalise something else and it might last the winter. This talent was not produced by modern engineering schools. It was ground out of scarcity and lack of choice.
In the countryside, one often finds this kind of person. Men who can build juddering aircraft from old engines, assemble a pond-going submarine from scrap metal and motors, or produce strange but functional farm tools out of almost nothing. In cities there are smaller versions of the same impulse: pavement card tables assembled from discarded sofas, boards and plastic stools; rooftop shelters made by residents for stray cats; stairwell systems of rope, clips, cardboard and wire. This form of chabuduo can even be charming, because it is ingenuity under poverty, a small resistance against insufficiency.
The problem is that the same word can also become a way of wiping away responsibility. The door won’t close? Kick it harder. The shirt arrived in the wrong size? Wear it anyway. The wall is cracked? It does not affect living. The wiring is messy? Everyone’s wiring is messy. At that point chabuduo is no longer invention under constraint. It is the evasion of duty. It turns every small defect into background noise, until one day the background noise becomes an explosion.
In a compound where I once lived, the entrance to the underground car park was covered by a long blue plastic canopy, like a giant pipe cut in half and laid over the ramp. It looked solid and casual at the same time. Nobody seemed to have thought seriously about what it would do in a storm, or whether the way it was fixed into the brick base was remotely adequate. Chabuduo, after all; it had been fine so far. Then a gale came. The canopy filled with wind like a sail, the nails tore loose, and the whole structure flew across the compound, smashing branches and stone tables. The next morning it lay on the grass like a wing from a crashed aircraft.
Fortunately, nobody died. But behind many real disasters there crouches not deliberate malice so much as accumulated “good enough”. The small compromises that merely irritate in daily life become lethal when they enter factories, construction sites, warehouses, transport systems and regulatory chains. One person can learn to step around the crooked stair outside his door or avoid a dangling wire. But when the same negligence is reproduced millions of times, when it enters food, vaccines, buildings, chemicals and traffic, it ceases to be inconvenience and becomes a mechanism of death.
Death piles up this way: bodies hanging from old ropes on construction sites, meat and vaccines without cold chains, badly wired rented rooms, and every danger dismissed as “nothing serious”.
No proper cold chain for vaccines? Put in some ice and send them anyway. Chabuduo. Sludge too expensive or troublesome to take to a disposal site? Pile it here; everyone else does. Chabuduo. Dangerous chemicals too tedious to separate carefully? Put the nitrates over there, the flammable material here; the warehouse is large enough. Chabuduo. Then children fall ill, hillsides collapse, fireballs rise, ports shake apart, and the list of the dead lengthens page by page.
Large disasters break briefly into the news and are then covered by newer news. Heavier still are the nameless small deaths. On construction sites, a man cuts metal without goggles as sparks spray toward his face. Another hangs from a safety rope made of old lengths tied together, with concrete below. Someone eats meat transported without refrigeration. Someone in a badly wired rental room does not wake from the night fire. The deaths of the poor are especially easily absorbed into statistical shadow. They were barely visible alive; after death they are not much more likely to be remembered.
Many Chinese cities seem permanently half-built. In back alleys, grinding wheels throw bright sparks, bricks fall without warning from scaffolds, wires cross pavements, and pits open beside the road without barriers. You ask a worker why there is no warning sign, why no tape has been put around the hole. He shrugs. Nobody told us to. The point is not that he does not understand that a hole can break a neck. It is that this fact does not appear on his task sheet. A risk without an instruction becomes almost unreal.
Hu Shih long ago turned chabuduo into a national parable. Mr Chabuduo lives by the principle that close is close enough. Arriving at 8:32 is close enough to arriving at 8:30. Writing one thousand instead of ten is only a difference of a few zeros. Iceland and Ireland sound roughly similar. Finally, when he falls ill, he sends for a doctor but receives a veterinarian. On his deathbed he consoles himself: life and death, after all, are not so different.
For Hu, this was a disease of vagueness. His cure was modernity: the punctual railway clock, the careful ledger, the precise prescription, verifiable knowledge. He believed modern institutions would sweep away muddle, mysticism and incompetence. But when modernity arrived in China, it did not simply bring precision. It brought migration, factories, urban expansion, war, revolution, work units, quotas, contracting, speed and scale. Many old skills were shattered; new professional ethics did not grow fast enough to replace them.
China once possessed craftsmanship capable of astonishing the world. The porcelain, lacquerware, woodwork, textiles and metal objects of the Song and Ming dynasties impressed Europeans and Ottomans alike. Those objects were not merely beautiful; they carried the pride of the maker in glaze, proportion, mark and line. Looking at them in museums today, we might be misled into thinking that the past was all refinement, because refined things are more likely to survive. Crude things vanish more easily; beautiful things are preserved. Even so, old China plainly possessed a developed and confident world of craft.
Fragments remain. Deep in certain lanes there are still instrument makers, carpenters, weavers, watch repairers, families who make miniature scenes with wit and delicacy. But they increasingly resemble islands. Modernisation destroys many old skills everywhere; this is not uniquely Chinese. In 19th-century Paris, Hamburg and New York, rural migrants flooded into cities, bringing with them rough building, bad plumbing and unreliable window frames. Local skills developed over centuries could become useless in the new urban environment within a generation.
The difference is that in many countries a new pride of profession gradually emerged. Industrial workers took pride in machines and processes. Bricklayers, plumbers, mechanics, electricians and autoworkers built standards around new trades. Invention itself gave pleasure; professional communities created discipline. A worker was not merely someone performing a task for a boss, but someone trying to become a certain kind of competent person: a carpenter, a driver, a welder, an engineer.
In China, many workers have remained trapped in an in-between zone. The old craft is gone, but a new professionalism has not fully taken root. Cities need them, factories need them, and buildings, roads, malls and metro lines are made by their hands. Yet the results of this modernity rarely belong to them. They produce modern life without possessing it.
If the thing you make by hand belongs to a world you will never enter, why take pains to make it well?
The feedback loop is broken. To make something well, it helps to use it, understand it, and be affected by its failures. A car worker who drives the car he builds will know where it rattles, where the seat is uncomfortable, whether the door lets in wind. A builder who lives in the houses he constructs will know whether the drainage works, whether the insulation fails, whether winter air slips through the walls.
But reality often runs the other way. Workers on assembly lines in Guangdong make small goods for living rooms thousands of kilometres away. Construction workers build apartments they will never afford. Renovation workers install bathrooms, then return to dormitories and shared washing areas. The price of a one-bedroom flat in a second-tier city may equal many years of a migrant worker’s income. They build lives with air conditioning, underfloor heating, picture windows and modern bathrooms, while their own future is more likely to be a dormitory bed or an old village house. When the maker and the user are separated by such distance, responsibility struggles to land.
The opacity of corporate structure further dilutes responsibility. Once, a brick might bear the mark of a kiln or maker. Today a project may be hidden behind holding companies, subcontractors, shell firms, local relationships and temporary contracts. When something fails, responsibility flows away like water. Local governments fear unemployment, lower GDP and stalled projects, so they are inclined to protect favoured businesses rather than punish them. Unless a scandal becomes large enough, many problems are quickly smoothed over.
The larger gap lies between planners and those who carry out plans. Many policies descend from above and become targets below: output, word counts, case files, arrests, starts, completions, growth rates. Targets care most about speed and quantity, while craft requires feedback, correction and time. A system driven by quotas easily treats completion as the only goal and quality as a luxury. Chabuduo is enough, at least enough to report upward.
There is one conspicuous exception: the technology sector. Perhaps it is different because it grew almost simultaneously with global technology rather than merely taking over cheap work that others wanted done. E-commerce, mobile payments, logistics systems and platform competition have genuinely forged complex, rapid and highly skilled capacities in China. To move goods from distant warehouses to consumers, to turn payment into a scan, to connect merchants, couriers, depots and platforms: these things cannot be done by chabuduo alone. They require coordination and create new skills.
Yet technology has not escaped the curse altogether. Sloppy code, broken apps, privacy leaks, bad search, fake medical advertising and evasions of platform responsibility are still common. When state-owned institutions refuse mature commercial systems for “security” reasons and try to develop their own internal software, a familiar roughness often returns. Search engines are weakened by censorship and protected from sufficient competition. Platforms can be brilliant at making money and suddenly dull when asked to accept responsibility.
Regulation should compensate for missing responsibility, but regulation itself is often chabuduo. After each accident there is ritual condemnation in the press, meetings are held, slogans repeated, a few people punished. Then the story disappears. Everyday regulation is trapped by perverse incentives. Regulators lack enough staff and money to cover every enterprise; yet once they inspect a site, they may be blamed for any future disaster there. The rational strategy of self-protection is to inspect less, inspect safer places, and avoid the truly troublesome ones.
A weak legal system makes mistakes cheap. In some countries, a serious accident may produce massive collective lawsuits and make a company feel real pain. Here, many harms can be handled through private compensation, local mediation and information control. The death of a migrant worker may be “resolved” with a payment small enough to reveal how little a life can cost. When life is cheap, craft, quality and safety struggle to become expensive.
It does not want brick-carriers, railway workers, welders and repairmen across the country to organise, any more than it wants any independent group to recognise itself nationwide.
Professional pride requires peers. An industry cannot create standards only through documents from above or through private conscience. It needs unions, associations, peer review, qualifications, shared language and internal shame. Many Western trades and professions developed modern standards through precisely these structures. A worker was not only an employee of a particular boss, but a member of a trade; doctors, lawyers and engineers were accountable not only to employers, but to professional communities.
Independent organisation, however, has always been sensitive here. Any structure that lets ordinary workers connect across regions and workplaces may be treated as a possible threat. Officially tolerated professional associations can exist at the upper end, but they often value political obedience more than serious peer accountability. There may be a medical association, but there is no powerful national association of plumbers, electricians or construction workers. Without a community of peers, professional ethics must depend on the small lamp of individual conscience, and that lamp is easily blown out in a strong wind.
All these things together make careful work a lonely act. Worse still, shoddiness is contagious. Craft inspires. A writer may hear a song and want to write better. A carpenter may see a finely made motorcycle and understand line and structure anew. Good work can shame the observer out of laziness.
The reverse is also true. When you see crooked doors, loose bricks, leaking pipes, broken apps and ownerless projects every day; when failure is not punished and dedication is not rewarded; when everyone tells you that usable is enough, it becomes hard to maintain faith in precision. People are educated by their surroundings. If the environment repeatedly teaches that rough work passes, carelessness gets paid and accidents can be buried, then chabuduo is no longer merely a phrase. It becomes a philosophy of life.
It is not a disaster that arrives suddenly. It is dust settling day after day. In the end, you lower your head beneath the wires in the stairwell, press a towel against the leaking balcony door, lean the fallen mirror back against the wall, and tell yourself: never mind. Close enough.
