Does 危機 (kiki: crisis) break down as danger + opportunity?
Lots of people like to think so, as it’s certainly reassuring to believe that a crisis has an element of opportunity.
But … not so fast. Victor Mair is a well-regarded professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote a paper in which he dismantled and assailed this misconception.
I happened to read this paper. His argument went into such great detail that I failed to grasp his larger point, and by the time I finished, I was still hard-pressed to see this popular notion as a myth.
I turned to a knowledgeable friend for guidance, and he summed up Mair’s point as such:
The idea behind this myth is that the Chinese word for “crisis” implies something positive, like the English word “opportunity.” This is because the character 機 can mean “favorable moment” in some contexts. But it doesn’t mean this in the word for “crisis,” and Chinese people don’t think of a crisis that way either.
Well, the two of them seem to be thinking about this very clearly, so I was inclined to agree. But then I found out that Halpern thinks otherwise. He says the 機 in 危機 means “opportunity, occasion, chance, time, crucial point.” Sounds pretty positive to me. I always put great stock in Halpern’s breakdowns. I don’t know why, but I’ve got to believe in someone and something in the wild, unstable world of kanji, don’t I? After all, we’re dealing with a character that has scads of possible meanings, as we’ve seen.
I hate when such conflicts remain unresolved in my mind. I feel horribly agitated just writing down these differing points of view. The agitation is so great that I hesitated to bring up this sore subject at all. Hmm … I just realized that 危機 has caused a crisis for me!
