be careful out there

Eminent Sinologist Victor Mair, whom I know mainly through his excellent rendition of the Tao Te Ching (for him, it's the Te Tao Ching), wrote an essay long ago that debunks the supposedly Chinese notion that "crisis = danger + opportunity."

In a time of economic crisis, when people will be tempted to rely on this maxim, it might be a good idea to go back to Mair's essay and reread it thoroughly. As Mair notes:

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.

Maybe the Koreans took the original Chinese and ran with it, but based on a hanja search of the Yahoo! Korean dictionary, the two Chinese characters that form the Sino-Korean word for "crisis" (wi-gi) are indeed the characters found in the expressions for danger (wi-heom) and opportunity (gi-hwae).

Is Mair's school of thought fairly prominent? I don't know, but his argument hinges on this:

It is absolutely crucial to observe that jī possesses these secondary meanings only in the multisyllabic terms into which it enters. To be specific in the matter under investigation, jī added to huì ("occasion") creates the Mandarin word for "opportunity" (jīhuì), but by itself jī does not mean "opportunity."

If I understand Mair correctly, he's saying that, just because a Chinese character has a given semantic field, this doesn't mean that that character can mean a specific thing outside a specific context. In other words, Mair might respond to me by noting that the gi in gi-hwae might indeed mean "opportunity," but the character has that valence only in that disyllabic context. In wi-gi, the character gi no longer refers to "opportunity."

So if you're in a crisis, don't get too optimistic. Treat the crisis with respect.


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