Chinese idiom · 成语
钩心斗角
Meaning
Hooking hearts, clashing eaves; cunning rivalry.
Character by character
Origin and story
Literary metaphorDu Mu's E Pang Gong Fu depicts an immense palace through winding corridors, sharply rising eaves, and buildings fitted to the terrain. In this architectural description, gou xin dou jiao refers to an intricate arrangement of structures and their corners. The passage is an imaginative literary portrayal, not a measured record of an excavated palace.
The expression later extended to intricately contrived writing and other competitive displays of ingenuity. Its familiar modern sense is interpersonal scheming: people calculating against one another for advantage. The move from interlocking architecture to competing minds explains why a phrase now associated with distrust originally described sophisticated construction rather than dishonest people.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
她离开那家公司，是因为受够了办公室里的钩心斗角。
She left that company because she had had enough of the office scheming.
Negative in ordinary use, referring to calculated rivalry rather than honest disagreement.