📖 Meaning
Anyone who comes will never get to go back. It means that the intruders are completely wiped out or annihilated. The idiom is typically used as a fierce warning that any enemy daring to come will be destroyed to the last.
📜 Origin Story
The phrase comes from the modern Chinese novel '暴风骤雨' (The Storm), written by the 20th-century writer Zhou Libo (周立波, 1908–1979) and published in 1948. In Part One, Chapter Thirteen of the novel, a character boasts that not only the '种殃军' but even their foreign masters would be met with '有来无回' if they dared to come. Set during the land reform movement, the novel gives the phrase a combative, defiant tone. In the following decades the idiom was widely adopted in military and patriotic propaganda to vow the total destruction of any invader.
💡 Example Usage
胆敢侵犯我们伟大的社会主义祖国，我们就一定叫他有来无回。
If anyone dares to invade our great socialist motherland, we will surely make sure he never gets to go back.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 有来无回
- Pinyin: yǒu lái wú huí
- Literal Translation: have come, no return
- Category: Determination
- Characters: 4