Sacrifice the Plum Tree to Preserve the Peach Tree

Sacrifice the Plum Tree for the Peach Tree When circumstances develop to the point where losses are inevitable, one should take the initiative to relinquish secondary and partial interests in order to preserve or exchange them for the principal and overall victory. Allusion:During the Warring States period, Sun Bin devised a horse-racing plan for Tian Ji. Tian Ji’s horses of all three grades were inferior to King Qi’s horses of the same grade, but Sun Bin had Tian Ji match his low-grade horse against the king’s high-grade horse, losing the first race; then match his high-grade horse against the king’s medium-grade horse and his medium-grade horse against the king’s low-grade horse, winning two races in succession. The defeat in the first race was the “plum” voluntarily paid; the two victories were the “peach” preserved—trading one partial defeat for overall victory. The name of this stratagem originally comes from the yuefu poem “Cock Crow”: “When insects come to gnaw the peach root, the plum tree suffers in its place.” It originally meant that the plum tree bore......