NOV. 12, 2014
Wait — isn’t belling the cat a good thing?
President Xi Jinping of China brushed aside a reporter’s question about visa difficulties on Wednesday with a saying from an old story, “Let he who tied the bell on the tiger take it off.” But he was not alluding to the fable that people in the West would associate with felines and bells, a tale whose point is quite different from the one Mr. Xi seemed to be making.
In the European fable, which dates at least to the Middle Ages and is often attributed to Aesop, a group of mice harassed by a marauding housecat agree that tying a bell around the cat’s neck to warn them of his approach would be an excellent idea — until, that is, the time comes to decide which of them will try to put it there. “Belling the cat” has thus entered English as a metaphor for a feat that is desirable but nigh impossible.
In the Chinese story, though, the challenge is to retrieve a golden bell. As related by Cultural-China.com, a English-language website associated with the Shanghai municipal government, the abbot of a Buddhist temple posed the situation to his monks and asked each of them to consider who could accomplish the task. The others came up empty, but Fadeng, a monk known for unorthodox thinking, said without hesitation: the person who put the bell there to begin with.
Fadeng’s answer has become a Chinese idiom in which the bell on the tiger’s neck is a problem, not an achievement; it is used to convey that the responsibility for solving a problem should fall on the person who created it.
By using the expression on Wednesday, Mr. Xi appeared to be warning foreign journalists that if they want to receive visas without delays or denials, it was incumbent on them to make changes to satisfy Beijing, not on Beijing to change its practices to satisfy them.
