tofu dreg

plural tofu dregs

1. attributivein pluraloftenengineeringA poorly constructed building in China, or the shoddy material(s) used to construct it.

   For example, the Kunming-Luquan highway in Kunming, Yunnan Province, had become a “tofu dreg project.”

   2015, Rongji Zhu, Zhu Rongji on the Record: The Road to Reform: 1998-2003, Brookings Institution Press, →ISBN, page 98

   5 more examples

   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.

   2011, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 177

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

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

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

   […] teachers, teaching assistants, and school nurses would have died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 had the buildings not been made of tofu dregs.

   2015, John C. Mutter, The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer, Macmillan, →ISBN, page 95

   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].

   2015, Y. Liu, “Tweeting, re-tweeting, and commenting: Microblogging and social movements in China”, in Asian Journal of Communication