And to support your point, in this day and age, it shouldn’t be hard to confirm the mere existence of a Chinese idiom if it were true. I casually asked my mom (native speaker) about this a few years ago, and she also said she’s never heard of it or anything similar. It ought not to be hard to dismiss it as a old white guy invention of “ooh, exotic orientialism! Confucius say…”
Edit: Didn’t we just have a thread about this not too long ago? Oh wait, it’s from 2001… 'May you live in interesting times!'