愚公移山

An old man nearly ninety lived at the foot of two mountains, Tàixíng and Wángwū, whose bulk blocked the way north from his door. Every errand, every journey to visit kin, required a long detour around them. One day he gathered his family and said: "Let us move the mountains. The south shore of the Han river lies beyond them. If we all work we can open the road."

He and his sons and grandsons began to carry away the rock and earth in baskets, one load at a time, to the edge of the Bohai sea. A neighbour, a clever man called the Wise Old Man of the River Bend (智叟, Zhìsǒu), laughed at him: "How foolish. You are old. With the strength left in you, you cannot even damage a single grass blade on the hillside. What do you imagine you will accomplish with these baskets of earth?"

The old man — called Yúgōng (愚公), "the Foolish Old Man" — answered: "Though I die, my sons will continue. When they die, their sons will continue, and their sons after them. The mountains do not grow. Each basket removed is a basket less. Why should the mountains not one day be flat?" The clever neighbour had no reply.

The story is told in the 列子 (Lièzǐ), a Daoist-flavoured text whose received form dates to the fourth century CE though it is traditionally attributed to Liè Yǔkòu, a pre-Qin philosopher. In the original ending, the mountain spirits, alarmed that the old man will not stop, appeal to the High God, who sends two giants to carry the mountains away. The perseverance is what moves heaven.

In June 1945, closing the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong gave a short speech titled "How the Foolish Old Man Moved the Mountains" (愚公移山). He retold the parable and gave it a direct political gloss. The two mountains, Mao said, were imperialism and feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party was the Foolish Old Man; the Chinese people were the mountain-movers; the God who would be moved was the masses themselves. "If they are moved, will these two mountains not be cleared away?"

The speech became a foundational text of the Maoist canon. For decades it was required reading in Chinese schools, and the phrase 愚公移山 acquired a specifically revolutionary resonance. The name of a PRC state television programme, the title of a 1961 Xu Beihong painting, the slogan in countless mass campaigns — the chengyu's twentieth-century career is inseparable from Mao's appropriation of it.

In contemporary usage, this political overlay has faded somewhat. Younger speakers use the idiom more or less as any language might: to praise long, patient effort toward a goal that looks impossible. But the phrase retains, faintly, the echo of the mass mobilisation rhetoric of the Mao era — worth knowing about when you hear it used in political speeches today.