Offering tea is a common practice of hospitality. However, “drinking tea” invokes informal verbal exchanges that invoke legally gray arrangements. For example, “drinking settlement tea” (hejiangcha) in late Qing and Republican China meant meeting with the police, gangsters, or parties with conflicting interests for negotiations, arbitration, and interrogations. In the contemporary People’s Republic of China, to “drink tea” (hecha) is to attend an informal summon by the public security authorities. Somewhat similarly, the “tea-drinking fee” (hechafei) in Shenzhen indicates informal fee arrangements found in business rent practices. Despite the presumed informality (i.e., seeming lack of legal formality) and verbal mode of communication (i.e., lack of textual record), these arrangements are replete with all sorts of possibilities, including legal consequences. In this context, what role do these tea meetings play in establishing the relationship between speech, inscription, and truth? What kind of (legal) subjectivity do these meetings presume and reproduce? In order to answer these questions, I draw from the ethnographic data that I collected in Shenzhen, China, as well as existing literature and social media content on the practices of “drinking tea” in contemporary urban China. I consider how cultural beliefs and assumptions about the act of inscription shape the efficacy of supposedly nonlegal or informal arrangements and the figures of authority that these practices give rise to.
