tofu-dreg

English

Etymology

Calque of Chinese 豆腐渣 (dòufuzhā, “tofu dreg; okara”), dòufuzhā as in 豆腐渣工程 (dòufuzhā gōngchéng) and similar phrases. Coined by Tan Zuoren in 2008.

Noun

tofu-dreg (plural tofu-dregs)

1. (engineering, attributive) A poorly constructed building in China, or the shoddy material(s) used to construct it.
   • 2011, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 177:

     No one asks about the shoddy “tofu-dregs engineering”; instead, we blindly accuse “running teacher Fan.” Nationalism is only a fig leaf for the feeble-minded, a tricky maneuver that prevents everyone from seeing the complete picture.

   • 2014, Catie Snow Bailard, Democracy's Double-Edged Sword: How Internet Use Changes Citizens' Views of Their Government, Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM, →ISBN:

     In the 2008 Sichuan earthquake several thousand school buildings collapsed, killing thousands of children and bringing the world's attention to the shoddy “tofu-dregs” buildings and rampant corruption that had skimmed the public funds ...

   • 2014, Yi Kang, Disaster Management in China in a Changing Era, Springer, →ISBN, page 56:

     Tan Zuoron, a writer who tried to document “shoddy tofu-dregs construction” that might have caused massive school-building collapses, was sentenced to prison.

   • 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.”

   • 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 [...]:

     ‘Tofu-dreg Projects’ during the Ming dynasty.

   • 2017, Paul Midler, What's Wrong with China, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN:

     The poor condition of tofu dregs schoolhouses was used to explain the high casualty rate, but the statistic did not fly. The ratio of young to old among the dead—roughly one to ten—ought to have been less stark.

Further reading

• 2015, John C. Mutter, The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer, Macmillan, →ISBN, page 71:

  China even has a term to describe structures of such poor construction quality: they are “tofu dreg” projects, referring to the remains that are left over after making tofu. The term refers to both the building materials—such as cement building blocks in which the sand fraction is far too high, for instance—and the construction process itself, in which too few steel-reinforcing elements (rebar) might be used in columns.