‘Swagger around town’ — Phrase of the Week
A Chinese executive is sacked after being caught on camera blatantly having an affair with a colleague.
Our Phrase of the Week is: Swagger around town (招摇过市 zhāoyáo guòshì).
The context
A top executive at a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), a huge state-owned firm, has been sacked for having an extramarital affair with a colleague.
Hú Jìyǒng 胡继勇 was removed from his position as general manager of Huanqiu Contracting and Engineering Company, a subsidiary of CNPC, and will face further investigation from its disciplinary committee.
Hu’s dismissal came after a video went viral on Chinese social media showing Hu, in his fifties, walking hand in hand with a female colleague, Dǒng Sījǐn 董思槿, during a business trip in Chengdu. Dong has also been dismissed, according to reports.
The scandal has dominated Chinese social media over the last week. Many expressed surprise about how blatant the pair were:
I’ve seen cheating before, but it’s always done in secret. I’ve never before seen people swaggering around and showing it off.
见过偷情的，都是偷偷摸摸进行，生怕别人知道，但没见过偷还要招摇过市的。
Jiànguo tōuqíng de, dōushì tōutōumōmō jìnxíng, shēngpà biérén zhīdao, dàn méi jiànguo tōu háiyào zhāoyáo guòshì de.
And with that, we have our Phrase of the Week.
What it means
Swagger around town is a four-character idiom. It was in the majority of news articles about the incident.
The four characters directly translate as “to show off ostentatiously” (招摇 zhāoyáo) and to “pass by the market” (过市 guòshì).
The idiom first appeared in The Records of the Grand Historian (史记), which was compiled by Si Maqian 司马迁, an influential historian who was alive during the Western Han dynasty period.
Published in the first century B.C.E., the Records is a comprehensive history of China’s first 24 dynasties, stretching back to 2,500 B.C.E.
The idiom appears in the following passage in Records:
For over a month, Confucius stayed in the state of Wei. One day, Duke Ling rode in the same carriage with his wife. The attendant Yong Qu accompanied them as a co-passenger. When they went out, they ordered Confucius to ride in the next carriage, and they deliberately took a detour through the marketplace.
居卫月余，灵公与夫人同车，宦者雍渠参乘，出，使孔子为次乘，招摇市过之。
Jū wèi yuè yú, línggōng yǔ fūrén tóngchē, huànzhě yōngqú cānchéng, chū, shǐ kǒngzǐ wéi cìchéng, zhāo yáo shì guò zhī.
The passage is telling a story during the Spring and Autumn period when the Duke of Ling took advantage of Confucius’s reputation to score political points by showing the public that he earned the philosopher’s support.
In modern Chinese, the idiom has come to mean “blatantly show off in public,” implying that the person’s actions are deceptive or lacking in substance.
For Hu and Dong, their careless and blatant public display of their affair has ended their careers.
