Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

This is a guest post from Randy Alexander, famous for Echoes of Manchu, frequent Language Log mentions, and Beijing Sounds’ most frequently visited post. For some background on the crisis/opportunity issue, see Benjamin Zimmer’s Language Log post here.

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By Randy Alexander

Scanning through the headlines on Saturday, I came across coverage of President Obama’s weekly address, with headlines juxtaposing the words “crisis” and “opportunity”.

Like being hit on the back of the head with a tennis ball, I was struck with the thought that here’s another politician using, as if it’s some kind of rite of passage, this tired old meme, which is derived from the idea that the Chinese are such optimistic people that their word for crisis is made by putting the character for danger and the character for opportunity together to make a compound word.

Of course that’s ridiculous, and Victor Mair debunked it years ago in a thought-provoking article which sparked some interesting discussion.  Ben Zimmer, the Indiana Jones of etymology, traced the meme back to the 1930s and showed its popularity among politicians.

Barack Obama’s version of it is interesting because he doesn’t link it to Chinese at all, and doesn’t include the “danger” element.

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Here is my attempt to resolve two important questions that were not addressed by Victor Mair’s essay, and which I have not seen answered anywhere else.

The first question is: what actually was the original meaning of 危机 wei1 ji1?

The best source for this is a Chinese etymological dictionary called Ci2 Yuan2 (word origins), published by Shang1 Wu4 Yin4 Shu1 Guan3 (Commercial Press).  It was first published in 1915, and the latest edition is 1988.  The Chinese citation is:

《辞源》1988 商务印书馆

The entry in question is 危机 wei1 ji1, p 434.  It is defined as 潜伏的 qian2 fu2 de (latent) 祸端 huo4 duan1 (source of disaster, cause of damage):  latent source of disaster.  It gives an example sentence from the Jin Dynasty (twelfth and early thirteenth centuries).  There is no mention of it having anything to do with time.

Looking at the entry for 机 (機 is the traditional form), p1638:  definition 12 says 危殆 wei1 dai4 (in great danger, in a critical situation), and adds 同幾 tong2 ji1, which indicates that it is the same as 幾 ji1).

The entry for 幾 ji1, p1002:  definition 3 gives 危险 wei1 xian3, and adds 幾，危也 wei1 ye3, indicating that it has the same meaning as 危 wei1.

So it appears that the word wei1 ji1 was made by simply putting together two characters that mean the same thing: danger.  What is danger but a latent source of disaster?

The second question is:  what do ordinary Chinese people think about the idea of dividing wei1 and ji1 into two parts, whether crisis + opportunity, or some other two meanings?  And if it can be divided, what meaning does the ji1 contribute?  It is a ridiculous idea to generalize about such a massive population without doing a massive study, but asking an assortment of Chinese people what they think might give us a little perspective on this.

So I asked many different people these questions.

• A 20 year old girl working in a grocery store said “sure!  Because in a crisis you have an opportunity to make things better”.
• A receptionist said the two characters don’t separately contribute meanings.
• A cab driver said he’s not sure about that.
• Two children, a ten year old boy and an eleven year old girl, said you can’t separate the characters like that.
• An English teacher said that the ji1 part means time (时刻 shi2 ke4).
• A class of graduate students with majors in automotive design, engineering, and logistics all agreed that the word cannot be separated into two meanings.

Another class of graduate students with majors in social sciences including philosophy and linguistics presented a lot of interesting perspectives.  Some agreed that the ji1 part means time (时机, shi2 ji1), adding that the wei1 part is adjectival and the ji1 part is nominal.  One person said that wei1 ji1 describes a current situation.  If you can deal with it well it can bring a positive result.  A doctoral candidate in philosophy said that although wei1 and ji1 may have their own meanings, it is impossible to draw a clear line between them in this word.

The discussion moved toward exploring the notion that it is difficult to avoid the “opportunity” meaning in “crisis”.  Being faced with a latent source of disaster is not a good situation, but it does present a choice.  One can either ignore the crisis, which will likely result in disaster, or one can face the crisis and do one’s best to resolve it, which may bring the situation back to how it originally was, or even change the situation for the better, especially if one takes measures to avoid future crises.

Then one student mentioned something very enlightening.  She said that this notion of attempting to resolve crises in as positive a way possible, even creating benefits that didn’t exist before the crisis, is not only popular in American business management, but in Chinese business management as well.  It may come to pass that the word wei1 ji1 acquires a new meaning:  danger + opportunity.

Ten years from now we may see a new entry in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary for this word.  Already it has indeed started to spread throughout the Chinese speaking world.  On www.baidu.com, the largest Chinese language search engine, entering the exact phrase “危机=危险+机会” produces 1,130 hits, many referring to an article from a human resources psychology site written in April, 2006 that cites Nixon’s use of the formula.  Entering “危机” “危险” “机会”, produces almost three million hits.

Victor Mair says he felt obliged to write his essay because “the damage from this kind of pseudo-profundity has reached such gross proportions”, and cautions against “a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages”.  While the former is true, and the latter is certainly an important admonition, it’s also important to understand that words are formed in many ways in every language, and later they acquire new meanings that are often far from their original meanings.  This is the natural course of etymology.