Friday, January 19, 2007

Can't...Stop...Blogging...

OKay, I swear I'll stop after this. From Atrios:

Chinese, Rice
From the WaPo article on Rice's peace-making trip to the Middle East:
At one point, Rice said that the difficult circumstances in the Middle East could represent opportunity. "I don't read Chinese but I am told that the Chinese character for crisis is wei-ji, which means both danger and opportunity," she said in Riyadh. "And I think that states it very well. We'll try to maximize the opportunity."

But Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, has written on the Web site http://pinyin.info/, a guide to the Chinese language, that "a whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly
inaccurate formulation." He said the character "ji" actually means "incipient moment" or a "crucial point." Thus, he said, a wei-ji "is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry."


I cite this not to criticize Rice - this "crisistunity" interpretation for the meaning of "wei-ji" has been around for ages. I cite this because I studied Chinese at Penn, and I knew Dr. Mair, though I didn't take any classes with him. (In fact he's a key reason why I wasn't a Chinese major.)

And personally, I always translated it differently:

"Wei," means crisis or danger; "ji" means "man, are you ever fucked."

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So it turns out that your interpretation of wei-ji is even more appropriate for what is going on in our Bush era foreign policy than that wishful thinking opportunity thing. What a surprise!!

5:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

An ancient Chinese proverb says -'A rat who gnaws at a cat's tail invites destruction.' Cindy Sheehan, please, stop. Stop. Please.

10:43 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Our President was never beter than tonight. Polished. Confident. Respected. Surely his finest hour.

7:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

he was good, but i certainly wouldn't say he was at his best.

2:49 PM  

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