This is one of my all-time favourite phrases in Chinese:

"Cutting garlic chives" (割韭菜 gē jiǔ cài)

It's usually translated as "cutting leeks" in English — even though the technical translation should be garlic chives (Allium tuberosum).

Garlic chives (韭菜) are a flat-leafed, garlicky staple of Chinese home cooking.

It’s an unglamorous plant: cheap, common, and grows back fast after cutting.

"Leeks" has just stuck in translation.

In modern Chinese it means:

Ripping off customers.

It started being used around the early 2010s in China's stock market.

It was used as a metaphor for what institutional investors did to inexperienced retail investors (know as “sanhu” 散户 in Chinese).

Which was to encourage the newcomers to buy stocks so as to inflate the price, then sell at the top themselves, leaving those retail investors making huge losses.

Once that batch was cut down, a fresh crop would always follow — just like garlic chives.

Ready to be ripped off.

From there the phrase spread well beyond finance.

• Crypto crazes.

• Consumer rip-offs.

• Get-rich-quick schemes.

Most recently, it's being applied to the OpenClaw boom.

Where non-techies are paying for installation, training, and uninstallation services, often without fully understanding what they're buying.

Example:

Behind this nationwide frenzy, there's a real sense that the non-techies are just being fleeced. 这场全民狂欢背后带有"割韭菜"的意味。