掩耳盜鈴 (idiom)

Takashi Kawamura, mayor of Nagoya, told Liu Zhiwei, a high-level Chinese official visiting from Nanjing, that his father, who was in Nanjing in 1945 at the end of the Japanese occupation of China, denied that mass murders and rapes known as Nanjing Massacre had ever happened, and that he believed only a “conventional fight” took place.

In “Spring and Autumn Period,” (771-476BC) when Fan, nobility of State of Jin, was exterminated, people rushed to their place to rob. Someone would like to take away a big bell but in vain for the huge size. He tried to hammer it into pieces but was worried that the noise would incur competitors. He covered his ears and kept whacking the bell.

This episode was kept in Lüshi Chunqiu, and we have the idiom掩耳盜鈴(yan3 er3 dao4 ling2) from this story. 掩耳means covering your own ears; 盜鈴to steal a bell.

The author commented as advice to the rulers of a country: “It’s understandable that you don’t want others to hear it. However, it doesn’t make sense to keep yourself from hearing it.”

The idiom then is used to refer to the act of lying to others as well as to yourself. For people like Kawamura, I think they need to brainwash themselves a lot before they try to brainwash others.

These days in Taiwan we have a step-down director-general of BAPHIQ from Council of Agriculture for covering up the outbreak of H5N2 avian flu in Changhua—just another act of 掩耳盜鈴.

掩耳盜鈴=掩耳盗铃