10 Chinese Idioms About Competition & Rivalry

Trace back to source

Literal: Chase root trace source

To chase (追) the root (本) and trace (溯) the source (源). Both halves are the same instruction in different terrain, one botanical and one riverine, and 溯 specifically means moving against the current — the work is upstream and harder than going with it. That is the sense the phrase carries: not merel...

Hide malice behind smile

Literal: Hide knife in smile

This descends from accounts of Li Yifu, a chancellor under the Tang, who was mild in manner and unfailingly courteous, and who destroyed anyone who crossed him. Contemporaries said he carried a knife (刀) hidden (藏) inside (里) his smile (笑). It is also the tenth of the Thirty-Six Stratagems. The smil...

Small problems cause disaster

Literal: Ant holes break dike

The Han Feizi observes that a dyke a thousand zhang long is breached through the burrow of ants and crickets. An ant's (蚁) hole (穴) ruins (坏) the dyke (堤) not by being large but by being ignored while it is small, and the passage is advice to rulers about attending to minor faults early. The saying ...

Moving in overwhelming numbers

Literal: Vast mighty flow

Vast (浩浩) and sweeping (荡荡) — a doubling that Chinese uses for water in volume, and the Yueyang Tower essay applies a close variant to the lake stretching past any shore. The sound is doing much of the work, four syllables of open vowels that take a long time to say. It describes mass in motion: a r...

Utterly impossible to escape

Literal: Add wings difficult fly

Even fitting (插) wings (翅) on would not make escape possible (难飞). It belongs to vernacular fiction, where it describes a surrounded fugitive rather than a legal or architectural fact. The hyperbole is the point: the situation is not merely difficult to escape but closed against a power the subject ...

Embrace diverse ideas inclusively

Literal: Gather all store together

In 进学解 Han Yu lists what a good physician keeps in store: fine drugs and coarse ones, jade fragments and cinnabar alongside ox urine and the skin of a broken drum, 俱收并蓄，待用无遗 — gathering (收) everything (兼) and storing (蓄) it up together (并), so that nothing is missing when the moment comes. He then t...

Accept without proper understanding

Literal: Swallow dates whole

Someone was told that pears are good for the teeth and bad for the spleen, and jujubes good for the spleen and bad for the teeth. He proposed to chew pears without swallowing them and to swallow (吞) jujubes (枣) whole (囫囵) without chewing — at which point, the Chan collection notes, he has understood...

Prioritize minor over fundamental matters

Literal: Root branch reversed position

Root (本) and tip (末) put in reversed (倒) position (置). The botanical pair is one of the most productive in Chinese: 本 is the base of the trunk and 末 the outer twigs, and the whole vocabulary of priorities is built on it. What the phrase names is not disorder but inversion — the secondary thing is re...

Moderation in all things

Literal: Excess equals deficiency

Zigong asked Confucius which of two disciples was the better; one went too far and one fell short. Asked whether going too far was therefore better, Confucius answered 过犹不及 — overshooting (过) is just like (犹) falling short (不及). The point is that they are the same kind of error, not that one is pref...

Self-deception through ignoring reality

Literal: Cover ears while stealing bell

A man found a bell too large to carry and tried to break it up; the noise alarmed him, so he covered (掩) his own ears (耳) and went on hammering at the thing he was stealing (盗). The Lüshi Chunqiu tells it as a lesson to rulers about refusing to hear what is being said of them. The original is a bell...