Qu Yuan, named Ping, was a clansman of the King of Chu. Well-read and deeply learned, he mastered the art of governance and excelled in diplomatic rhetoric, earning the trust of King Huai of Chu, who appointed him to the high office of "Left Minister."
In the court of King Huai of Chu, a senior official named Shangguan held the same rank as the great poet Qu Yuan but, lacking Qu Yuan's talent, grew fiercely jealous. When the king ordered Qu Yuan to draft a new national decree, Shangguan tried to alter the unfinished text, but Qu Yuan refused. So Shangguan went to the king and slandered him: "Your Majesty, everyone in court knows you tasked Qu Yuan with this decree. Yet after every new policy, he boasts, 'No one but me could have done this!'" Enraged, King Huai gradually distanced himself from Qu Yuan.
As the state of Chu's governance deteriorated daily, the heartbroken poet Qu Yuan, seeing the king heed slanderers and confuse right with wrong, poured out his anguish in *Li Sao*. In his work *Bu Ju*, he declared, "Would I rather soar wing to wing with the swan, or squabble over scraps with barnyard fowl?"—a defiant refusal to stoop to the level of the power-grabbing courtiers.
Later, the idiom "Chickens and Ducks Scrambling for Food" came to describe petty people fighting for power and profit, or mediocre individuals squabbling over trivial gains.
Source: *Records of the Grand Historian*, "Biography of Qu Yuan"
Meaning of the Idiom: Later, the Chinese idiom "鸡鹜争食" came to describe petty people fighting for power and profit, or mediocre individuals squabbling over trivial gains.