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Comment by GiraffeNecktie | Hacker News Reader

From the article "The name, by the way, translates to “millet” in English, but it is also the combination of two Chinese words that have a powerful resonance here: rice and rifle. As any patriotic citizen will tell you, together those words mean “revolution.” "

Huh? The two characters in xiaomi (小米) are xiao3, meaning "small" and mi3 meaning "rice". In other words, millet. Rifle is qiang1.

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The phrase is "小米加步枪", which comes from a Mao Zedong speech to the 8th route army and militia when fighting the Japanese in WWII. They had no real government or supplies and had to subsist off of millet and fight with single-firing rifles to overthrow their occupiers.

It translates to "millet and rifles", just as the article said. It's pretty common in Chinese to use a part of a famous phrase to refer to its entirety. Actually, Baidu is another company name that does this.

Thanks. That's a much clearer explanation.

With reference to a near-quote from Mao Zedong (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works...):

"We have an expression, millet plus rifles. In the case of the United States, it is planes plus the A-bomb. However, if the United States with its planes plus the A-bomb is to launch a war of aggression against China, then China with its millet plus rifles is sure to emerge the victor."

You pay for the phone, but you get the juvenile nationalist reference for free.

Soundalikes are quite important in Chinese language. Perhaps 小 sounds like another character meaning "rifle". Or perhaps, as you suggest, the reporter got it slightly wrong... 小(small) often means "half", e.g. 小时= "little two-hour-period", and 米 also means "meter". So 小米 could mean "half a meter", the length of a rifle, which could've colloquial speech in revolutionary China.

小时 = one hour (or literally "small time period"). I searched through several dictionaries and couldn't find anything related to guns or revolutions that fit with xiaomi.

Yes, I noticed that too, the journalist must have misunderstood that.

Don't see any rifle association there.

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