Why business execs love to quote Chinese proverbs.
By Daniel Gross
Posted at Slate.org Wednesday, July 5, 2006, at 3:59 PM ET
Okay, this story is nearly four years old, but still worth a look. For a Sinophile, at least.
Type A types are invoking Chinese proverbs far beyond the rarefied air of Aspen. It's hard to get through any mass gathering these days—an annual meeting, a corporate offsite, a nursery-school graduation—without being exposed to some timeless wisdom from the Middle Kingdom, such as: "As the Chinese blessing/curse goes, 'May you live in interesting times.' " Many a conference call or CNBC interview begins—especially when the company has screwed up royally—with a variant on the chestnut that "in Chinese, the character for crisis is the same as the character for opportunity." ...
Today, many executives quote Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu for the same reason they started exchanging their bespoke suits for business-casual khakis: They have to show that they're with it. China represents the future and is the locus of immense growth. Casually tossing Chinese proverbs into conversation shows that you're down with the latest trends, even if you haven't (yet) relocated your manufacturing capacity to Shenzhen. ...
Of course, Westerners frequently get it wrong when they try to translate Chinese homilies for their audiences. (Unlike most of our manufactured products, the "interesting times" proverb may not be of Chinese origin.) And as David Li, a Harvard-trained economist who teaches at Beijing's Tsinghua University, told me, it's more accurate to say that the Chinese word for crisis is actually two characters, and opportunity is one of them. (University of Pennsylvania Chinese expert Victor Mair rubbishes the whole idea here.)
I cited Dr. Mair in my recent post about learning Chinese. Here are some excerpts from his essay debunking the crisis/opportunity notion. (Note that, as a rule, I avoid using the word "meme" as strenuously as I can.)
There is a widespread public misperception, particularly among the New Age sector, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of elements that signify “danger” and “opportunity.” I first encountered this curious specimen of alleged oriental wisdom about ten years ago at an altitude of 35,000 feet sitting next to an American executive. He was intently studying a bound volume that had adopted this notorious formulation as the basic premise of its method for making increased profits even when the market is falling. ...
The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. ...
Among the most egregious of the radical errors in this statement is the use of the exotic term “Ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters. Linguists and writing theorists avoid “ideogram” as a descriptive referent for hanzi (Mandarin) / kanji (Japanese) / hanja (Korean) because only an exceedingly small proportion of them actually convey ideas directly through their shapes. (For similar reasons, the same caveat holds for another frequently encountered label, pictogram.) It is far better to refer to the hanzi / kanji / hanja as logographs, sinographs, hanograms, tetragraphs (from their square shapes [i.e., as fangkuaizi]), morphosyllabographs, etc., or — since most of those renditions may strike the average reader as unduly arcane or clunky — simply as characters. ...
The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. ...
To be specific in the matter under investigation, jī added to huì (“occasion”) creates the Mandarin word for “opportunity” (jīhuì), but by itself jī does not mean “opportunity.”...
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to offer [an] example from English that is closer to our Chinese word wēijī (“crisis”). Let’s take the –ity component of “opportunity,” “calamity” (“calamity” has a complicated etymology; see the Oxford English Dictionary, Barnhart, etc.), “felicity,” “cordiality,” “hostility,” and so forth. This –ity is a suffix that is used to form abstract nouns expressing state, quality, or condition. The words that it helps to form have a vast range of meanings, some of which are completely contradictory. Similarly the –jī of wēijī by itself does not mean the same thing as wēijī (“crisis”), jīhuì (“opportunity”), and so forth. The signification of jī changes according to the environment in which it occurs.
The nature of this troublesome word will be much better understood if it is pointed out that, in Mandarin morphology, morphemes are divided into “bound” and “free” types. “Bound” morphemes can only occur in combination with other morphemes, whereas “free” morphemes can occur individually.
It just so happens that, in the real world of Mandarin word formation, wei and ji are both bound morphemes. They cannot occur independently. Just as the syllable/morphemes cri- and -sis that go together to make up the English word “crisis” cannot exist independently in an English sentence, so too wēi and jī cannot exist by themselves in a Mandarin sentence. They can only occur when combined with other word-forming elements, hence fēijī (“airplane”), jīhuì (“chance, opportunity”), wēixiǎn (“danger”), wēijī (“crisis”), and so forth. ...
My only memory of seeing wēijī deployed to say "the Chinese word for crisis is the same word for opportunity," comes from a foggy and deeply perplexed viewing of Naked Lunch. I have a hunch that is whence the notion got its greatest boost in pop-consciousness.
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