此消彼長 Save Sign in to save words Simplified: 此消彼长 cǐxiāobǐzhǎng ㄘˇ ㄒㄧㄠ ㄅㄧˇ ㄓㄤˇ one declines while the other flourishes one loses out when the other one gains (as in a trade-off or a zero-sum game) idiom Character by character 此(cǐ)this 消(xiāo)diminish 彼(bǐ)that 長(zhǎng)grow A Chinese word or character, or English Search Sources CC-CEDICT, CC BY-SA 4.0 pinyinjs, Apache-2.0