10 Chinese Idioms About Power & Authority

Add crucial finishing touch

Literal: Dot dragon's eyes

Zhang Sengyou painted four dragons on a temple wall in Jinling and left them without pupils, saying that if he dotted the eyes they would fly away. Pressed, he dotted two. Thunder split the wall and those two went up into the cloud; the two he had left blind were still there. The account is in Zhang...

Borrow authority to intimidate

Literal: Fox uses tiger's power

A tiger caught a fox, and the fox said heaven had made it lord of the beasts, so eating it would be defying heaven — walk behind me and see whether anything dares stand its ground. The tiger followed, the animals fled, and the tiger concluded the fox had been telling the truth. The Strategies of the...

Plan strategy carefully

Literal: Work the counting rods in the command tent

Liu Bang, asked why he had won the empire when Xiang Yu was the better soldier, named three men he could not equal. Of Zhang Liang he said: 运筹帷幄之中，决胜千里之外 — turning the counting rods inside the tent curtains (帷幄), he decides victory a thousand li away. The Records of the Grand Historian keeps the spe...

Plan far ahead

Literal: Deep plan far thought

Jia Yi uses it in his essay on the faults of Qin, contrasting the rebel Chen She with the men of the earlier age: he had not their deep (深) planning (谋) or their far (远) reckoning (虑), and yet the empire fell to him. The pairing sets two dimensions against each other, depth and distance, and Chinese...

Extremely urgent

Literal: Pressing at brow and lash

Pressing (迫) at (在) the brow (眉) and lashes (睫). The measurement is the point: the gap between eyebrow and eyelash is a few millimetres, so the phrase places the threat inside the distance at which anything can be done about it. That makes it stronger than ordinary urgency, which implies time remain...

Advance methodically with caution

Literal: Each step make camp

At every step (步步) making (为) a camp (营). The phrase belongs to the vocabulary of vernacular military fiction rather than to any surviving manual, and it describes a specific and slow method: advance a short distance, fortify, secure the supply line behind you, and only then advance again. Its point...

Achieve secretly through misdirection

Literal: Secretly cross Chencang

Shut into Hanzhong in 206 BCE, Liu Bang took Han Xin's plan and came back out 从故道, by the old road, to fall on Zhang Han at Chencang. That is all the Records of the Grand Historian says. The decoy everyone knows — men set to conspicuously rebuilding the burnt plank roads while the army went another ...

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...

Professed love hiding actual fear

Literal: Lord Ye loves dragons

Lord Ye (叶公) loved (好) dragons (龙): they were on his belt-hooks, on his chisels, carved through the rooms of his house. The real dragon heard of it and came, put its head in at the window and its tail into the hall, and Lord Ye ran with his wits gone. Liu Xiang tells it against a ruler who said he w...

Beyond comprehension or explanation

Literal: Cannot be thought discussed

Not (不) able to be (可) thought (思) or spoken (议). The phrase is Buddhist and technical in origin, describing what lies beyond the reach of conceptual thought and language — the standard Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit acintya. That is a strong claim, and ordinary use has worn it down considerably:...