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So many have asked me about “不折腾”, as in “不动摇、不松懈、不折腾”, a new three-nope mantra put forward by President Hu Jintao in a speech last month to mark the 30th anniversary of the opening-up policy championed by the late Deng Xiaoping that it gets to a point where I feel I need to write a piece about it – also as a preemptive measure to prevent the same question from being asked again in future. So here we go. First of all, the popularity of the phrase – not to mention the great confusion it has caused – shows that when the Communist Party speaks, people listen. Which must be a great relief, I'm sure. For the Party, of course. However, that's not of concern here. Here, what we're concerned with is how to put those three Chinese words into English, in a way that not only a literal translation is made, but deeper meanings are also conveyed in the process. First, the idea of 不折腾 is pretty easy to understand. Say, you're meeting someone at 4pm but you call in at 3:30 saying you're going to be late. You suggest that you meet at 4:45 instead. "Oh, never mind," the other person will say, "Don't bother (别折腾了). I've got another appointment coming up at 5, and so let's call the whole thing off. See you some other day." Or imagine yourself, for example, unable to get to sleep. You make tosses and turns in bed, disturbing bedmates. To them, your tossing about is meaningless because they don't think tossing in bed solves a thing, and so they would rather you stop doing it, thus allowing everybody to get a wink. If they mutter anything to you in this situation, they will probably say something like: “不折腾，行吗？我们还要早起呢！(Could you please stop tossing about? Guys have to get up early you know (and so we need some sleep now).” | 
