"The Chinese ideogram for crisis is made up of the characters for both danger and opportunity..."
..or so says a character in Howard Hendrix's Lightpaths. I've read the same thing in motavational bidness books and in New Age all-is-all chapbooks. Eager to try out my scholarship I ran it past Mai, a native Mandarin speaker on our support staff. Her response? "Where do you guys come up with this stuff ?...now let's get some coffee."
It turns out that wei and ji (left and right character respectively, simplified strokes), when joined, mean precarous incepent moment; crisis. Wei supplies the meaning of dangerous or precarious and ji can be danger or incipient moment in this context. Ji only becomes opportunity in conjunction with characters like hui (occasion). As noted in Pinyin.info, It's a language, not a pidgin. You can't just assign meanings for rhetorical convenience.
However, most Chinese folks of my acquaintance are rather practical people. Ancient Chinese wisdom....me ?...uhh...Sure, you got it.
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