掩耳盗铃 yǎn ěr dào líng
Cover your ears, steal the bell — self-deception as a strategy.
The short answer
掩耳盗铃 means to plug your own ears while stealing a bell: a portrait of self-deception, mistaking your inability to hear the alarm for everyone else's.
The story
The Lüshi Chunqiu tells of a man who wanted a great bronze bell from a neighbor's door and could not move it. So he decided to break it with a hammer — but the clang would carry. His solution: cover his own ears, and strike.
Everyone heard it, of course. The original text draws the lesson with disarming clarity: fooling yourself is easy to do and fools no one else. (In the oldest telling the stolen object is a bell; later tellings shrink it to a door bell, and the idiom kept the bell and lost the nuance.)
What it means today
It is the idiom for every strategy of pretending the evidence away: deleting the bad reviews you can still see, announcing a problem solved while it worsens, hiding spending from an app that tracks spending. The bell rings all the same.
The English nearest are “burying your head in the sand” and “lying to yourself” — but the Chinese version has a burglar in it, which improves any sentence.
How to use it
Typical shape: 数据都公开了，还想隐瞒，简直是掩耳盗铃, “the data is public; trying to hide it is stealing the bell with your ears plugged”.
In use
2 examples账都记在App里了，删掉记录就是掩耳盗铃。
The spending is all in the app — deleting the record just covers your own ears.
问题没有解决，只是不提了，这是掩耳盗铃。
The problem wasn't solved, just unmentioned — that's stealing the bell with plugged ears.
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.