What does ‘power’ literally mean in the ​Chinese language? I deconstructed some notions by characters

Last night, I dreamed of the history class in senior high school, with the image that the teacher tells us the difference between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’, yet they are not distinguished from one another in Chinese. They are all called ‘自由’, which literally means ‘obey yourself’.

So, I just grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down some universal notions, both in English and Chinese. Since each Chinese character has its own meanings, together with, compound characters combine into vocabularies and sentences. Chinese is also a high context language, the real meaning of a certain character or word shall be understood in the whole context.

Here I deconstructed the words and listed the possible meanings of each character, hopefully, it provided another perspective on cultural understanding.

Despite these differences shown from a linguistic perspective, the good things are always deserving a fight.

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