Word.ws English Dictionary

tofu dreg

tofu dreg noun: a poorly constructed building in China, or the shoddy material(s) used to construct it.

Noun

tofu dreg (plural tofu dregs)

  1. (attributive, in plural, often) A poorly constructed building in China, or the shoddy material(s) used to construct it.
    • 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

Examples of tofu dreg in a sentence

  • […] 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...
  • 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:
  • The poor condition of tofu dregs schoolhouses was used to explain the high casualty rate, but the statistic did not fly.2017, Paul Midler, What's Wrong with China, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN:

Forms of tofu dreg

pluraltofu dregs

Origin of tofu dreg

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.

Questions about tofu dreg

What does tofu dreg mean?
Tofu dreg means a poorly constructed building in China, or the shoddy material(s) used to construct it.
How do you use tofu dreg in a sentence?
[…] teachers, teaching assistants, and school nurses would have died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 had the buildings not been made of tofu dregs.
What part of speech is tofu dreg?
Tofu dreg is a noun.
What is the plural of tofu dreg?
The plural of tofu dreg is tofu dregs.

Words near tofu dreg in the dictionary

  1. toftman
  2. toftmen
  3. tofts
  4. tofts and crofts
  5. tofu
  6. tofu dreg
  7. tofu dregs
  8. tofu scramble
  9. tofu scrambles
  10. tofu skin
  11. tofu skins

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tofu dreg (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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