"Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water." - W. C. Fields

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danger + opportunity ≠ crisis

"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 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. At that moment, I didn't have the heart to disappoint my gullible neighbor who was blissfully imbibing what he assumed were the gems of Far Eastern sagacity enshrined within the pages of his workbook. Now, however, the damage from this kind of pseudo-profundity has reached such gross proportions that I feel obliged, as a responsible Sinologist, to take counteraction.

A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate formulation... practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus. This catchy expression (Crisis = Danger + Opportunity) has rapidly become nearly as ubiquitous as The Tao of Pooh and Sun Zi's Art of War for the Board / Bed / Bath / Whichever Room...

While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean "crisis" and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of "danger," the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify "opportunity."..

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. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one's skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis...

A wēijī in Chinese is every bit as fearsome as a crisis in English. A jīhuì in Chinese is just as welcome as an opportunity to most folks in America. To confuse a wēijī with a jīhuì is as foolish as to insist that a crisis is the best time to go looking for benefits...

Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of elements meaning "danger" and "opportunity" are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society, for it lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit. Adopting a feel-good attitude toward adversity may not be the most rational, realistic approach to its solution.

Finally, to those who would persist in disseminating the potentially perilous, fundamentally fallacious theory that "crisis" = "danger" + "opportunity," please don't blame it on Chinese!...

There is no traditional use of jī that means "opportunity" per se. Jīhuì is a neologism coined to translate the English word "opportunity."

To say that jī means "opportunity" is like saying that the zōng of zōngjiào means "religion" (N.B.: jiào here means "doctrine, teaching"). Zōng traditionally means a line of orthodox transmission, or a clan lineage. It is anachronistic to say that zōng by itself means "religion." For numerous examples of such calques and neologisms, many (such as those for "economics" and "society") involving an initial borrowing into Japanese, and then a reborrowing into Chinese with a completely new, Westernized meaning, see Victor H. Mair, "East Asian Round-Trip Words," Sino-Platonic Papers, 34 (October 1992)."


Incidentally, the 1992 paper is amusing, because it has the Chinese words written in by hand.