As the Chinese say: 中国人居然不这么说！

Chinese people say...

There's a Chinese expression that says...

Did you know that in China they...

I have heard this expressed many times, and usually what follows is a "fact" which is anything but. Here are some examples:

In Chinese, Crisis is "Danger & Opportunity"

This is a popular go-to for (mostly Western) business and motivational speakers. You see, in China, it goes, they are wise enough to understand that a crisis contains both a danger, but also an opportunity. It's a wonderful story of the pithy common wisdom of the Chinese.

Except it's wrong. The word "weiji" is composed of two characters, and the first one does in fact mean "danger" or "hazard." However the second one, according to people who actually read Chinese, means something close to "change point." The actual word that most closely aligns with "opportunity" is a two character compound, "jihui", which does contain the "ji" character, but it must also contain the character meaning "to meet." This (motivated?) misunderstanding has been around since at least 1938, when it appeared in the English-language publication Chinese Recorder in the editorial "The Challenge of Unusual Times." If people in China look at every Crisis and see danger plus an opportunity, they must be influenced by non-Chinese speakers, either directly or indirectly, because there's no way to extract this meaning from the original Chinese.

May You Live in Interesting Times

The oft repeated Chinese curse is "May you live in interesting times." The sarcastic nature of the supposed expression is very plain. Again, the circumspection of the Chinese is on display.

Except there is no evidence of a Chinese expression that says this. The closest one can find is shown on the left; "Níng wèi tàipíng quǎn, bù zuò luànshì rén" which means "better to be a dog in a time of peace than a human in times of unrest." The first recording of that expression is from a collection of short stories published by Feng Menglong in 1627.

The made up curse, however doesn't really appear anywhere until about 1936, in the memoirs of Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, who served as British Ambassador to China. However H.E. Knatchbull-Hugessen claims that he was told this expression in England immediately prior to his dispatch to his post.

The phrase may have been invented by Joseph Chamberlain, a member of the British Parliament and father to future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The elder Chamberlain was quoted in the record of parliament in 1898 saying:

"I think that you will all agree that?we are living in most interesting times.?I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also,?new objects for anxiety."

At time, there was no connection to China at all, though there may have been some attribution later on that was erroneous.

You Only Pay the Doctor When You are Healthy

This chestnut is quoted in a publication from the World Economic Forum

"In ancient China, it’s been said, people paid their doctors retainer fees for staying healthy. If a person got sick, the payments would be suspended until the doctor brought a patient back to health. To a Western healthcare consumer, this approach may seem unorthodox.?" https://bit.ly/3KEk7Bv

This legend has no clear source, and is also likely apocryphal. While its origin is dubious, it makes for an interesting discussion point when one wants to open a discussion of modern medical care and its expense. In one interpretation, it has a potentially hazardous incentive structure. If doctors only get paid by patients who are healthy, they should shun the sick. And if patients do fall ill, doctors would have little incentive to invest much money in curing those for whom the prognosis is long and expensive. Better to just recruit a new source of income than trying to solve the patient's illness at a certain point. Part of the reason that healthcare is so expensive is that individuals value their own care and longevity more than makes actuarial sense. This is understandable, as while actuarial tables work in the aggregate, we all live as individuals. A doctor, as a third party, has a much weaker incentive to undertake heroic measures to keep a sick patient alive.

In China today, health insurance consists of employee hospitalization insurance or residents insurance. Employee hospitalization insurance covers employees and retirees from state-owned enterprises and some private-sector businesses. While the contributions (fee payments) are made by companies on behalf of employees, the insurance plans themselves are managed by municipal government who collect the employer contributions. These policies cover about 1/4 of Chinese citizens.

The remaining 3/4 of the population have residents insurance, which is intended to cover farmers, migrant workers, and children. These policies are chronically underfunded as many employers evade making payments. About 4% of Chinese citizens have no health insurance at all.

What Does This Mean and Why Does It Matter?

"So what?" you may ask. "While all of these attributions may be false, they all attempt to cast Chinese people in a positive light. Is that really a bad thing?"

Well, saying that something is OK because it's not intended to be denigrating is really not a legitimate position. First, they perpetuate falsehoods. There is an excellent soliloquy by Dr. Valery Legasov (which ironically is probably fictional) from the mini-series Chernobyl.

"What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?"

Truth it seems in in short supply. And these "gems of Chinese wisdom" contain what Stephen Colbert termed "truthiness." Colbert coined this term while he was still working on Colbert Report. He defined it thusly:

Truthiness (noun) - the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.

There is a desire amongst many in the "West" to believe that China is a font of wisdom superior to modern Western belief. While China certainly had in its history a number of beliefs that may seem to be preferable to today, it also had foot-binding, heavy restrictions on female literacy, and an oppressive imperial-based class system. Ancient China was no utopia.

Additionally, there is an element in all of these mistaken beliefs which seeks to "exoticize" Chinese people. While the above items seem laudatory, they all serve to emphasize the difference of Chinese people from Westerners. Exoticism implies a group of people are "others" and can never be understood by outsiders. It serves to detract from their shared humanity by making them "not like us." It plays into the trope of Chinese being "inscrutable" because they simply think differently from "us."

Finally, it serves as an easy substitute, where we, the non-Chinese get to thrust our own inventions on the Chinese. It's a shortcut from learning the actual truth, which is difficult, and replaces it with something consistent with our stereotyped image. China is a nation with a long history and rich culture. We should not allow ourselves to supplant genuine understanding with attractive false narratives.