吃苦 chī kǔ
To eat bitterness — endurance as a virtue and a job skill.
The short answer
吃苦 means “to eat bitterness”: to endure hardship, tolerate tough conditions, and keep going. Being able to 吃苦 — 能吃苦 — is listed like a skill on the national résumé.
What it means
Chinese treats hardship as a food you can develop a taste for. 吃苦 covers the grinding parts of any pursuit: the cold dormitory, the double shift, the hours of drill that make the performance look easy. To be able to eat bitterness is praise; to refuse is, in some mouths, a character flaw.
The verb is ordinary, not heroic. Parents 吃苦 for their children; students 吃苦 before the gaokao; the phrase appears in job ads the way “self-starter” does in English ones.
How people use it
能吃苦 — can eat bitterness, durable. 吃不了苦 — can't take it. Parents announce that 年轻人要多吃苦, young people should eat more bitterness; younger generations reply that 吃无意义的苦 is just waste — suffering with no return is not a virtue but a management failure.
That argument — which bitterness counts — is the live debate. Even the pushback keeps the metaphor: the question is never whether to eat, but what is worth eating.
Where it comes from
The metaphor runs deep in a language that says life is 痛苦 (bitter pain) and that hard-won success tastes of 先苦后甜 — bitterness first, sweetness after. Farming, famine, and a century of upheaval made endurance a family inheritance, taught by grandparents who had no choice.
Western media rediscovered the phrase recently — “eat bitter” circulated widely in essays about Chinese work culture — but for Chinese families it is less a discovery than a dinner-table constant.
In use
2 examples这个行业要能吃苦，吃不了苦就坚持不下来。
This trade takes endurance — if you can't eat bitterness, you won't last.
先苦后甜，现在多吃点苦，以后会好的。
Bitterness first, sweetness after — eat a bit more hardship now and things will improve.
The characters
Explore individuallyIndividual character meanings do not always explain the meaning of the whole word.
This guide is original Dengdeng editorial content, offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. The linked dictionary entries adapt CC-CEDICT under the same license.