{"id":639,"date":"2007-01-23T13:01:38","date_gmt":"2007-01-23T05:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/pinyin-info-1-condoleezza-rice-0\/"},"modified":"2018-08-29T11:49:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-29T03:49:00","slug":"pinyin-info-1-condoleezza-rice-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/pinyin-info-1-condoleezza-rice-0\/","title":{"rendered":"Pinyin Info 1, Condoleezza Rice 0"},"content":{"rendered":"

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has joined Al Gore<\/a>, John F. Kennedy, and other prominent U.S. politicians in spreading the crisis\/opportunity myth. Fortunately, though, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post<\/em> found Victor H. Mair’s essay danger + opportunity ≠ crisis<\/a> here on Pinyin Info: <\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

But Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, has written on the Web site https:\/\/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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

sources and further readings: <\/p>\n