2011, J. Zha, Tide players: the movers and shakers of a rising China:
[…] one will tell you about a “tofu-dreg project”—a building that has started to fall apart after two years—or relate a story of forced eviction where neighborhood residents fall victim to deals made between officials and developers.
2012, N. Zhang, The Wenchuan Earthquake, social organizations, and the Chinese state, in Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems:
Examples of such issues include corruption of local officials, poverty of a province, lack of education among migrant workers, and the "Tofu-dreg Project" that caused many thousands of children's deaths due to the collapse of school buildings in the earthquake.
2015, Rongji Zhu, Zhu Rongji on the Record: The Road to Reform: 1998-2003, Brookings Institution Press (→ISBN), page 98:
For example, the Kunming-Luquan highway in Kunming, Yunnan Province, had become a “tofu dreg project.” These are Zhu Rongji's comments on the report. 2. Translator's note: “tofu dreg projects” are ...
2015, P. Yu, Politics of xu: Body politics in China:
Later, the extravagant opening ceremony of the Games was sharply contrasted with the “TofuDreg Project” (doufuzhagongcheng, referring to the poorly constructed school buildings) that was linked with the local schools’ corruption scandal unveiled in the tragic Sichuan [Earthquake].
2015, Mei Fong, One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (→ISBN)
[>] Environmentalist Tan Zuoren, who coined the phrase “tofu dreg project”: “Chinese Earthquake Activist Tan Zuoren Released After Five-Year Prison Term,” The Guardian, March 27, 2014, ...
2015, Y. Liu, Tweeting, re-tweeting, and commenting: Microblogging and social movements in China, in Asian Journal of Communication:
Individual Chinese citizens explicitly criticized the Ministry of Railway, describing it with such disparaging terms as ‘asshole’ and ‘bastard,’ and described the high-speed train project as one of the ‘tofu-dreg projects (豆腐渣工程 in Mandarin),’ which referred to projects with poor [quality].
2016, S. Sun, The Three Conditions for Behavior, and the Five Behavior Management Measures, in Five Basic Institution Structures [...]:
Preventive measures
‘Tofu-dreg Projects’ during the Ming dynasty.
2017, Kiran Prasad, Communication, Culture and Ecology: Rethinking Sustainable Development in Asia, Springer (→ISBN), page 152:
... state power due to his concern about the tofu dreg project in various Sichuan schools. After many such attacks by the authorities, Chinese people are afraid of expressing their real opinion, fearing the threats that can befall them.
2019, D Dai, L Liu, G Tian, Interregional redistribution and budget institutions with private information on intergenerational externality, in Review of Economic Design:
For example, local politicians in China may get promoted to higher levels because of doing a good job in public infrastructure investment or establishing a business friendly environment, or may get punished for being responsible for tofu-dreg projects in the provision […]
2020, W. Lin, A China without the Chinese Communist Party: The Geopolitics of the Falun Gong:
You can see that during the Sichuan Earthquake, some victims told the Sound of Hope Radio [run by FLG followers] that they were in tofu-dreg projects [poorly constructed building], using batteries and radio in their pocket to try and understand the outside world.
2021, W Zhang, Heritage making and interpretation in postcolonial Harbin: contemporary urban memory of the Russian-built Harbin Railway Station and beyond, in the Journal of Cultural Heritage Management [...]:
[…] are also filled with such nostalgia, especially when they recall the high quality of the Russian-built buildings: “Everything built by the Soviets [means ‘Russians’] [2] is magnificent and strong” [Interviewee L-5], and buildings at that time were “unlike the many tofu-dreg projects […]
