After 20 years of success, reform is a hard sell.

My comments:

Put in another way, after 20 years of success, it’s hard to sell reform – convince everyone how important it is to make changes.

“Sell” is usually known as a verb. Here, “sell” is a noun, that’s all (the problem there is).

Colloquial English sometimes gets foreigners confused and worked up, but often it’s much ado. This is why young students are encouraged to go abroad to study English, so that they just hear what native speakers have to say and follow suit without thinking too much, without questioning everything, without being bothered so much with grammar and all the rules in the textbook.

Anyways, a hard sell is just something that’s hard to sell.

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Sold-out house

All bark and no bite

Leave money on the table

Boots on the ground

Jailbreak

Boots on the ground

Common thread

A fact of life

Leave no stone unturned

Train wreck

Keep up with Joneses

Finishing touch

No great shakes

Warts and all

Catch -22 situation

Pull-up trey

I'm sold

Flip-flop

Sit on its hands

Casing the joint

Free rein

Bear the brunt of

Cross one’s path

Tribute projects

Off the beaten track

At the forefront of

Seat warmer

The rule of the jungle

On-the-go

On the fence

Wild guess

In the high teens

Touch up

Unforced error

Catch a break

City slicker

Political correctness

Gee up

Big mind

Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.