Free Chinese learning, tailored for you! This series highlights idioms and proverbs, useful in many contexts. Let’s explain 「以毒攻毒」 and how it’s used.
Here is the Chinese idiom 「以毒攻毒」, along with its meaning and how it is used.
Attack: treat. A term used in traditional Chinese medicine, referring to the use of toxic drugs to treat malignant diseases such as carbuncles. A metaphor for using the contradictions within bad things to oppose bad things, or using bad people to deal with bad people.
The Mandarin pronunciation of this idiom is :
yǐ dú gōng dú
while its Cantonese pinyin is :
yi5 duk6 gung1 duk6
The collection of Chinese idioms is enormous, with each one holding its own meaning and purpose. We hope these resources can assist you in better understanding and learning Chinese.
