8 Chinese Idioms About Bad Bosses & Toxic Leadership

Excellence that outshines all others

Literal: Out of the kind, above the gathered

This one comes from the Mencius, where Confucius is described as having come out from his kind and risen above the gathered crowd — 出于其类，拔乎其萃. To emerge (出) from one's category (类) and stand above (拔) the assembly (萃) is not to be better at the same thing but to be no longer comparable. Somebody who...

Creating unnecessary troubles for oneself

Literal: Mediocre person self-disturbs

This is from the New Book of Tang, on the official Lu Xiangxian, who held that the world is fundamentally without trouble and that mediocre people (庸人) stir it up (自扰) into vexation. The diagnosis is unkind and specific: the difficulty is manufactured, and manufactured by the person now complaining ...

Beyond hope of redemption or reform

Literal: Cannot be saved by medicine

This one comes from the Book of Songs, in a poem warning that when the burning grows fierce enough there is no (不可) saving it with medicine (救药). The image is of a fever past treatment, applied to a state whose rulers will not listen. It was a political warning before it was a medical one. A person ...

Evenly matched with neither superior

Literal: Not mutually up down

Not (不) mutually (相) above and below (上下). Chinese ranks by verticality, so denying both directions denies the ranking itself — the claim is not that two things are similar but that no order can be established between them. Competitors, candidates and rival products, and it is genuinely neutral, whi...

Exploit others during their vulnerability

Literal: Ride person's danger

To ride (乘) on another person's (人之) danger (危). 乘 is the verb for mounting a horse or a chariot, so the image is of using someone's difficulty as the thing you stand on to get higher. The History of the Later Han condemns it in exactly those terms. Chinese moral vocabulary treats this as distinctly...

Constantly anxious about gains and losses

Literal: Worry about gain, worry about loss

Confucius, in the Analects, asks whether a mean man can be served with in the government of a state: before he has got the thing he is anxious about getting (患得) it, and once he has it he is anxious about losing (患失) it — and a man anxious about losing will stop at nothing. That last clause is the s...

Practice what one preaches

Literal: Words and actions consistent

Words (言) and deeds (行) at one (一致). The Analects sets the standard it assumes — 君子欲讷于言而敏于行, the gentleman wishes to be halting in speech and quick in action — and the ordering matters: the remedy for a gap between the two is taken to be saying less, not achieving more. That is a distinctly Chinese ...

Be domineering and arrogant

Literal: Point with the chin, order with a look

颐 is the lower jaw and cheek; to point with it (指) and to command (使) by 气 — the air or expression on the face, not the breath — is to give orders without troubling to speak. The picture is exact and unpleasant — a lift of the chin, an audible sigh, and somebody moves. What the phrase objects to is ...