From our You Have Heard It Said But I Tell You desk, the Chinese word for crisis, wēijī 危机, is not a pictogram of danger plus opportunity. You can see this definition in action in this 2009 book, Crossing the Soul’s River, in which the author says he was given this explanation first-hand.

In fact, very few Chinese letters represent little pictures of their ideas. More importantly, jī alone is not opportunity; it’s only part of several words.

A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate statement. A casual search of the Web turns up more than a million references to this spurious proverb. It appears, often complete with Chinese characters, on the covers of books, on advertisements for seminars, on expensive courses for “thinking outside of the box,” and 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.

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Perhaps it would be worthwhile to offer another example from English that is closer to our Chinese word wēijī (“crisis”). Let’s take the –ity component of “opportunity,” “calamity” (“calamity” has a complicated etymology; see the Oxford English Dictionary, Barnhart, etc.), “felicity,” “cordiality,” “hostility,” and so forth. This –ity is a suffix that is used to form abstract nouns expressing state, quality, or condition. The words that it helps to form have a vast range of meanings, some of which are completely contradictory. Similarly the –jī of wēijī by itself does not mean the same thing as wēijī (“crisis”), jīhuì (“opportunity”), and so forth. The signification of jī changes according to the environment in which it occurs.

“Danger + Opportunity ≠ Crisis“, Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Pennsylvania