Historical vs. contemporary Chinese linguistic politeness (Journal of Pragmatics, 2010)

Journal of Pragmatics xxx (2010) xxx–xxx

PRAGMA-3312; No of Pages 15

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Journal of Pragmatics

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Historical vs. contemporary Chinese linguistic politeness

Yuling Pan a, Daniel Z. Kadar b,*aU.S. Census Bureau, 10201 Woodvale Pond Drive, Fairfax Station, VA 22039, USAbDepartment of Oriental Studies, Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Benczúr utca 33, Budapest H-1068, Hungary

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history:

Received 29 March 2010

Received in revised form 22 July 2010

Accepted 20 October 2010

Keywords:

Politeness

Chinese

Historical

Contemporary

Postcolonial

A B S T R A C T

The present paper provides a comparative survey of historical and contemporary Chinese

politeness, hence contributing to postcolonial pragmatics and linguistic politeness

research. There is a unique gulf between historical and contemporary Chinese politeness,

which is largely due to the influence of the 19th century colonization of China.While China

was in fact partially colonized only, the invasion by foreign imperialist powers had a strong

impact on the development of Chinese sociopragmatic norms. By demonstrating the gulf

between ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’, this paper provides an unprecedented case study

for the influence of colonization on native language use. The analysis is divided into two

parts. The first, section 2 of the paper, analyzes the ideologies, norms and practices of

historical Chinese politeness, and demonstrate that historical Chinese politeness had some

features that made it vulnerable to large scale socio-historical changes that led to the birth

of contemporary Chinese politeness. Section 3, after reviewing politeness norms and

ideologies in contemporary China, examine the similarities and differences between

historical and contemporary practices of polite communication.

� 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The aim of our paper is to provide a comparative overview of historical and contemporary Chinese politeness, hencedemonstrating the major gap that exists between the politeness ‘systems’ of these two periods. Comparing historical andcontemporary Chinese linguistic politeness is challenging, due to the fact that the practices of Chinese politecommunication underwent a dramatic transformation during the late-19th and 20th centuries. In the course of thisperiod, which is brief from a diachronic perspective, the historical norms of deferential communication practicallydisappeared from Chinese society and were replaced by a new set of politeness norms. This large-scale change – whichresulted in, among other things, the disappearance of the extensive historical Chinese honorific lexicon of severalthousand words (cf. Kadar, 2007) – is a unique phenomenon because in other languages there is no comparable gulfbetween ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ politeness norms (for example, no linguistic politeness anthology, such asHayashi and Mianmi (1974) or Hickey and Stewart (2005) mentions a similar phenomenon). This is not to say thatlinguistic politeness does not change in other societies. For example, as researchers such as Kohnen (2008) and Jucker(2010) demonstrate, politeness in England underwent several large changes in its history; however, the development ofpoliteness in these languages was continuous and relatively gradual. This unique gulf between ‘historical’ and‘contemporary’ in Chinese leads many researchers and laymen to formulate ambiguous views on Chinese polite behavior(cf. Pan, 2000a). As we noted elsewhere,

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +36 1 3214 830 179; fax: +36 1 3229 297.

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Y. Pan), [email protected], [email protected] (D.Z. Kadar).

Please cite this article in press as: Pan Y, Kadar DZ. Historical vs. contemporary Chinese linguistic politeness, Journal ofPragmatics (2010), doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.018

0378-2166/$ – see front matter � 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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Y. Pan, D.Z. Kadar / Journal of Pragmatics xxx (2010) xxx–xxx2


[i]t has been a challenge to researchmodern Chinese politeness due to themultiple layers of societal changes that impactlinguistic politeness in Chinese. There is a disconnection between the modern and traditional Chinese in terms of theapplication of politeness formulae. On the one hand, the Chinese people are famed for their long tradition of polite ritualsand polite vocatives, and on the other hand, modern Chinese politeness behavior seems to be quite different and distantfrom these ‘famous’ polite phenomena. As a result, there seems to be a myth about Chinese politeness. (Pan, 2008:328)

This topic is of relevance from the perspective of postcolonial sociolinguistic/sociopragmatic studies, that is, explorationsof language use in societies which were previously colonized; it is particularly intriguing from the aspect of postcolonialpoliteness research, a relatively new area (perhaps the first extensive volume on this theme was edited by Mühleisen andMigge in 2005). This is due to the fact that the collapse of historical politeness was initially generated by foreign powers’invasion of China starting in the 1840s, and the subsequent colonization of certain regions of the country, and so theformation of modern Chinese politeness is a postcolonial event (see more below). As is discussed elsewhere (Pan and Kadar,2011), themainmotivating factor1 behind the aforementioned large-scale change of Chinese politeness was the fact that theChinese suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of previously despised foreign nations. As a result of this, manyChinese brokewith their traditional norms and values first during the latter part of the 19th century and the years after 1911(the foundation of the Republic of China) and then again after the Communist takeover in 1949. While colonization hasresulted in the gradual disappearance of native languages and sociolinguistic customs in many countries (Spolsky, 2004:83–86), as far as the authors are aware, there is no other language in which there is such a clear-cut difference between‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ politeness. Thus, the analysis in this paper provides a unique case study for the influence ofcolonization on native language use.While inmany other colonized countries, the colonist’s language directly influenced thelocal language by language transfers or code-mixing and code-switching (for example, code-switching between English andChinese has been accepted as the normal way of speaking in Hong Kong, see Li, 1996), the case presented in this paper showsa more subtle influence of colonization on native language.

To understand this subtlety, we briefly mention the impact of a series of foreign invasions that turned China into a semi-colonized state and its impact on the Chinese elite class that led to anti-traditionalist movement. Starting from the FirstOpium War with British forces (1839–1842), China was dragged out with brutal physical force from a self-dependentisolation that had been in effect since the time of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). The Chinese looked at their country as themost ‘civilized’ realm in the world, with unparalleledmilitary and economic power. It is thus not surprising that the Chinesepopulationwere dumbfounded by the humiliating defeat suffered during the First OpiumWar and the subsequentwars.2 Butthe shock was due not only to the technology of warfare, but also, perhaps more importantly, to differences in culture. TheChinesewho came in contactwithWestern invaders3 realized that during the centuries of isolation from the rest of theworldChina had been left behind in several respects. The social, legal, scientific,medical and other systems of the English, and othernations that subsequently formed colonies in China, seemed to be more developed than their traditional native Chinesecounterparts. Seemed to be should be emphasized because the Chinese evaluation of the ‘West’ was at least partiallyinfluenced by imperialist and colonization ideologies.4 Whatever the truth is, the hatred of foreigners led the Chinese eliteclass to turn inward by questioning the value of traditional Chinese culture. Several members of the elite (and those of othersocial groups that became the ruling elite in the coming years) began to criticize traditional Chinese culture, in particular,Confucianism, and argued for the adoption of Western culture (Jin, 1993). Immediate modernization (i.e. ‘Westernization’,see more in Ruhi and Kadar, 2011) seemed for many to be the correct answer to the menacing situation.

As a result, anti-traditionalist sentiments arose first in 1919, during the so-calledMay FourthMovement (Wu-Si-yundong[TD$INLINE] ), which was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement. The movement’s name derives from a studentdemonstration that occurred onMay 4, 1919, and became an anti-imperialist national movement (Jin et al., 1999). Referringto the period between 1915 and 1921, the broader May Fourth Movement – or, more precisely, the long-term change itgenerated – resulted in a large-scale intellectual endeavour to reform language and culture. After theMay FourthMovement,traditional culture was left relatively intact until the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong [TD$INLINE] (1893–1976) tookover political power from the Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-Shek (Jiang Jieshi [TD$INLINE] , 1887–1975) in 1949. During theCommunist rule a series of events took place that essentially changed Chinese language and culture.

In sum, the gulf between ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ Chinese politeness is a native reaction to the influence of foreignpowers. Thus, while China is rarely mentioned in relation with postcolonial theories, it is reasonable to claim that there is astrong relationship between the sociopragmatic events during the 19th and 20th centuries and (post-)colonialism.While the

1 It should be noted that the authors do not intend to suggest that colonizationwas the onlymotivating factor behind the diachronic change studied; yet,

it can be argued that it was the most important within a group of factors.2 The First Opium War was soon followed by the Second Opium War (1856–1860).3 Such encounters took place mainly at the eastern coastal territory of China. The whole of China did not become a colonized country like India or

Singapore, but instead the invading powers conquered certain territories in which they established colonies with extraterritorial rights.4 As Li (2007:23) from theDutch scholar Hans van de Ven, points out, ‘‘the Qingwas ill-prepared to dealwith Britain’s naval challenge not because itwas a

backward country or a Confucian society with little regard for the military, but because it had faced different sorts of military challenges and followed a

different path of military development than Britain’’. That is, it would be quite simplistic to argue that Chinese society was less ‘developed’ than British

society and was consequently defeated by the latter, an accusation often made by Marxist theorists against ‘feudal’ China. In line with scholars such as van

de Ven and Li above, we would argue that the situation was more complex: the defeat of China was primarily military-based. AlthoughWestern social and

scientific results might have seemed to be highly developed and tempting to many Chinese, the social superiority of the British was at least partly a myth,

which served the financial and ideological goals of the conquerors.



Y. Pan, D.Z. Kadar / Journal of Pragmatics xxx (2010) xxx–xxx 3


whole of China was never ruled by a single colonial government (unlike, for example, several South Asian states or India),foreign powers invaded the country, obtained extraterritorial rights and conquered certain coastal regions as colonies, thatis, the country became a semi-colony. Perhaps even more importantly, in Western rhetoric the Chinese were typicallytreated as ‘cultural others’, to use Spivak’s (1988) terminology. With this background in mind it seems to be a reasonableapproach to apply postcolonial theorization on Chinese data.

Due to space limitations, the present work only describes politeness in historical and contemporary China, withoutproviding either an in-depth analysis of the transitional period, during which the replacement of old with new actually tookplace, or the driving forces behind the change. In this form, the present paper is a preliminary report on a research project ofthe authors (see more in Pan and Kadar, 2011). In other words, our goal is to demonstrate the sociolinguistic/pragmaticimpact of colonization through the change of Chinese politeness ideologies, rather than dealingwith the language policy andnorms of the colonization era, that is, the direct influence of colonization on Chinese. Therefore, while we compar the pre-and postcolonial times, the ‘colonization’ in-between is treated in an abstract way: we presuppose its politeness ideology-changing power, relying on historical studies such as the works of Osterhammel (1989, 2005).

The analysis in the present paper is divided into two parts. The first, section 2 of the paper, analyze the ideologies, normsand practices of historical Chinese politeness. The goal of this section is to demonstrate that while historical Chinesepoliteness is completely different from its contemporary counterpart, it had some features that made it vulnerable to large-scale colonial and postcolonial changes that led to the birth of contemporary Chinese politeness. Section 3, after overviewingpoliteness norms and ideologies in contemporary China, examine the similarities and differences between historical andcontemporary Chinese politeness by analyzing linguistic politeness in the different units of discourse, as well as itsinterpersonal distribution. In the conclusion, we argue that while contemporary and historical politeness share somecommon characteristics, in fact they are too different to be parts of the same linguistic tradition or ‘system’, whichdemonstrates the influence of colonization on Chinese society.

This paper follow a diachronic order by first surveying historical Chinese politeness and then overviewing the norms andpractices in its contemporary counterpart. Before beginning the analysis, a brief description of our theoretical view regardingpoliteness should be given. The paper is anchored to some extent to recent theorizations of politeness (e.g., Mills, 2003; KadarandMills, 2011) in thatwe– somewhat cautiously–donotclaimthatour interpretationofpoliteness ideologies andbehavior isvalid to every layer of Chinese linguistic politeness in society. As wewill make clear below, since we exploremajor diachronicchanges in Chinese politeness, we are precisely interested in its socially dominant and typical aspects. It should be added thatthe present analysis in limited in scope, in the sense that we intentionally limit our analysis only to the formal aspects ofpoliteness (see more on this problem in Pan and Kadar, 2011).

2. Politeness in historical China

First, the present section study the dominant ideologies and norms that influenced politeness behavior in late imperialChina, and then it provide a brief practical account of historical Chinese politeness behavior. The aim of the section is todemonstrate the fact that while historical Chinese politeness fundamentally differed from its contemporary counterpart, forseveral reasons it was open to the large-scale change that led to the formation of contemporary Chinese politeness.

Before delving into the analysis, it is necessary to provide a brief account of the historical periods that we are going tocover. The label ‘historical’ can cover the whole period of Chinese history from ca. the 10th century B.C. until the foundationof the Republic of China in 1911, and in fact from the perspective of the politeness historian this is rather a homogenousperiod in many respects (Kadar, 2007). However, in the present paper only the final phase of historical Chinese politeness isanalyzed, in order to provide insight into the state of politeness just before the collapse. In order to differentiate this periodfrom other eras, the label ‘late imperial’ is adopted, which describes Chinese politeness during the late 18th and the 19thcenturies. The extracts of the present section, except examples from ancient philosophical sources in section 2.1, are citedfrom sources written during this period.

2.1. Historical Chinese politeness ideologies and norms

In order to understand the polite behavior in a given culture, society or a community of any size, it is necessary to look intothe major dominant politeness ideologies that form the group’s politeness norms. In fact, as different scholars argue (Eelen,1999; Mills and Kadar, 2011), it is improper to equate politeness behavior with a given ideology because in reality severalideologies interact in social politeness, and also because ruling ideologiesmay differ across (sub)groups and Communities ofPractice within a society. Also, ruling ideologies often belong to the elite and not the whole of the society. Thus, it seemsimpossible to say that politeness in a given society, especially in such a large country as China, is or was solely ruled by Xideology, and we do not intend to create such a simplistic view. Instead, we follow the views of historical politeness experts,such as Held (1999) and Watts (1999), who focus on the ideologies of the ruling elite, which unavoidably influence thepoliteness behavior of lower classes to some extent. In other words, we focus on the ‘mainstream’ ideological background ofindividual politeness behavior without excluding or denying the existence and influence of other ideologies, as well asinteraction and struggle between politeness ideologies (seemore on this issue in Fitzmaurice, 2010). This is a feasibleway forus, all the more because we are interested in the diachronic change of Chinese politeness norms, which meant the challengeof the ideologies and language use of the social elite.





In the case of historical China the aforementioned ruling ideology should be Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism.Confucianism or Rujia [TD$INLINE] is based on the philosophy of Confucius (Kongzi [TD$INLINE] , i.e.Master Kong or Kong Qiu [TD$INLINE] , 551–478 BC),an ancient thinker who after failing to spread his ideas among the ruling circles took disciples and became themost influentialteacher of his time. When referring to Confucianism as a ‘philosophy’ rather than religion wemean that it is a system of moralprinciples aimed atmaintaining harmonywithin the family, community and state, rather than a religion in the Judeo-Christiansense (seeadetailed introductiontoConfucianismine.g.Yao,2000). Confucianismwas rejectedby thefirstChineseQinDynasty,which united the country in 221 BC, but after the fall of Qin it became the ‘official’ state ideology. While its official status waschallenged fromtime to time, during the SongDynasty (960–1279) it gained itsfinal shapeas the ideologyof theChineseelite, inthe form of the so-called Neo-Confucianism (Lixue [TD$INLINE] ). Neo-Confucianism, alongwith both reforming and conserving certainConfucian ideals importedelements from2otherphilosophiesandreligions, namelyTaoism(Daojiao [TD$INLINE] [TD$INLINE] ) andBuddhism(Fojiao [TD$INLINE] ); cf. Chan (1963). In terms of social philosophyNeo-Confucian thinkers reinforced the ancient ideals of social hierarchy, andso conserved politeness ideologies until the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Confucian Classics, as well as later treatises on proper behavior, did not define any notion identical to the word‘politeness’ (or themodern Chinese limao [TD$INLINE] , ‘politeness’). Instead, they described appropriate social communication as part ofthemoral concept of li [TD$INLINE] . Li is a complex notion, whichmeans, among other things, ‘(religious) rites,’ ‘social rules,’ and ‘respect’(Gou, 2002); that is, li is not restricted to proper communication only, but also includes the performance of rites in front of thespirits of ancestors and other aspects of rituality (Kadar, 2007). Yet, if we limit our study to the communicational aspect of li, itsmost important prescription is the following: in the course of proper communication one should be deferential by denigrating

himself and elevating his speech partner, a notion which was introduced to pragmatic studies by Gu’s (1990) groundbreakingpaper. The ideology of self-denigration and addressee-elevation in deferential communication was somewhat similar to theconcept of ‘humility’ in medieval Europe (Curtius and Trask, 1990), and it continuously appears in Confucian morality books.

In order to illustrate the way in which this concept was discussed by the Confucian Classics, let us cite the followingexamples:

(1)

PleasePragma

[TD$INLINE]

[. . .] Accordingly, the superiorman does not elevate himself in his doings or overvalue his ownmerit, hence seekingthe truth. He does not aim to make extraordinary actions, but instead seeks to occupy himself only with what issubstantial. He displays prominently the good qualities of others, celebrates their merits, and underestimates hisownwisdom. Although thus the superior man denigrates himself, the ordinary people will respect and honor him.(Book of Rites, Biaoji)

(2)
[TD$INLINE]
He does not dare to venture into importantmatters without [the ancestors’] authorization [through sacrifices], andthus denigrates himself and elevates his ancestors. (Book of Rites, Guanyi)

(3)
[TD$INLINE]
The gentleman is reverent and does nothing amiss, is respectful towards others and observant of the rites, and allwithin the Four Seas are his brothers. (Analects XII.5, translation of James Legge)

(4)
[TD$INLINE]
Li means the denigration of the self and the elevation of the other. (Book of Rites, Quli, Part One)

These citations from the Classics Book of Rites (Liji [TD$INLINE] ) and Analects (Lunyu [TD$INLINE] ) demonstrate that, according to Confucianthinking, one should denigrate oneself (zibei [TD$INLINE] ) and elevate the other (zunren [TD$INLINE] ), in order to gain respect. Further, one shouldavoidelevatingoneself(zida [TD$INLINE] ),whichis inbreachofproperbehavior.Byactinginsuchawayonewillnotonlygainsocial ‘capital’– to use Bourdieu’s (1983) term– andmaintain harmonywith his family, as illustrated by the first and the second examples, butwill also attain more divine goals such as social harmony and prosperity as shown by example (3). In fact, as example (4)demonstrates, thedenigrationof self and the elevationof others is the quintessence of lion the level of language andbehavior. Ofcourse, historical Chinese politeness cannot be reduced to this phenomenon only (seemore in Pan and Kadar, 2011), and so it isreasonable to limit its definition here as the ‘quintessence’ of politeness, rather than equating it with Chinese politeness per se.

Considering the close ties between denigration/elevation and li, it is useful to examine the relationship between li andsocial power, in order to gain insight into the social function of the historical Chinese elevation/denigration phenomenon. Infact, li is not a socially ‘harmless’ notion but a political concept, bymeans of which thewise ruler and his advisers will be ableto lead the country in an effective way, as illustrated by the following brief citations:

(5)
[TD$INLINE]
Confucius said: ‘If a superior man loves li, the people will not dare not to be reverent.’ (Analects XIII.4)

(6)
[TD$INLINE]
The Master said: ‘When those above are given to the observance of the rites, the common people will be easy tocommand.’ (Analects XIV.41)

cite this article in press as: Pan Y, Kadar DZ. Historical vs. contemporary Chinese linguistic politeness, Journal oftics (2010), doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.018




As these citations demonstrate, li is a concept of governance that aids the ruler to properly command his subjects, bymakingthe commoners respect the elite –what is interesting to note here is that both of the citationsmake it quite clear that only theupper classes need to understand li, whilstmembers of lower classes need only to be deferential. From this social perspective,li has a similar role to notions of ‘politeness’ in other societies, in particular historical ones, that is, it is a power resource forthe ruling elite.5 And, as it will be demonstrated in the next section, the linguistic manifestation of li, i.e. elevation/denigration, was designed in a fashion to reinforce this function and distribution of li. Due to the fact that historical Chinesepoliteness behavior was associated with Confucian ideology through the notion of li, and also forms of politeness weredesigned to reinforce this ideology, harsh critiques against Confucian ideological views, which characterized the birth ofmodern China, made historical Chinese politeness vulnerable and subject to criticism, as we will argue in the conclusion ofthis section.

2.2. Historical Chinese politeness in practice

In what followswe explore historical Chinese politeness by focusing on the practice of its ‘quintessence’, as we defined it,elevation and denigration, as well as the vulnerability of this system to social changes. First wewill study themanifestationsof elevation/denigration at the lexical and discourse levels, and then we will examine it from the perspective ofgrammaticalization.

2.2.1. The manifestation of elevation and denigration on lexical and discourse levels

The concept of elevation/denigration is a representative feature of politeness in traditional East Asian (the so-calledsinoxenic) cultures; its more widely known (‘equivalent’) is the Japanese kenjō-go [TD$INLINE] and sonkei-go [TD$INLINE] . Due to the factthat Chinese does not allow morphosyntactic changes, this two-fold concept manifests itself in discourse through a largequantity of honorifics and discursive strategies.

On the lexical level, the most frequently used honorifics are terms of address that denigrate the speaker/writer andelevate the speech partner/recipient. For example, the term xiaoren [TD$INLINE] (lit. ‘small person,’ i.e. ‘this worthless person’)denigrates the speaker and gaojun [TD$INLINE] (‘high lord’) elevates the speech partner, while xiaonü [TD$INLINE] (lit. ‘small woman,’ i.e. ‘worthless daughter’) denigrates the speaker’s daughter and qianjin [TD$INLINE] (lit. ‘thousand gold,’ i.e. ‘venerable daughter’)elevates the addressee’s daughter. The proper use of terms of address was amust for every language user independent of thegiven person’s level of education. In order to illustrate this, let us cite the following section from a late imperial vernacularnovel, which was analyzed in Kadar (2008:149–150):

(7)

5 Nevert

(206BC–22

different fr

PleasePragma

[TD$INLINE]

Having heard the district magistrate call him, the old man became terrified and trembled with fear as he kneeled infront of the bench and said: ‘‘This worthless person is the undertaker of Gaojia-wa. I respectfully greet Your Honor.’’

[TD$INLINE]

Judge Di asked: ‘‘What is thy name, and how long hast thou been the undertaker?’’

[TD$INLINE]

The man said: ‘‘This old man hath the family name Tao, his name is Tao Daxi.’’

[TD$INLINE]

But before he could even finish his words, the two constables standing by his side cried: ‘‘Thou, old-dog-head, whatan outrageous impertinence this is! In front of His Honor thou durst address [thyself] as ‘old man,’ let us beat theetwo hundred times with the bamboo, and we will see whether thou wilt yet assert that [thou art] ‘an old man,’ ornot!’’

[TD$INLINE]

The undertaker, turning pale as he saw that the constables were barking at [him] so angrily, became more humbleand said: ‘‘This worthless person should die for his guilt. This worthless person has been an undertaker for the lastthirty years. How can I serve Your Honor?’’

(Di gong an [TD$INLINE] [The Cases of Magistrate Di] – Chapter 6)

heless, it should be added that the notion of li is relatively ‘democratic’ in the sense that in historical China – in particular from the Han Dynasty

0AD) onwards – rank was primarily gained through learning and participation in official examinations and not by birth. Thus, it is somewhat

om e.g. the notion of ‘being a gentleman’, which originally was a right that could be gained through birth only (cf. Watts, 1999).





In the course of this courtroom interaction the speaker (the old undertaker) makes a communicational failure by referring tohimself with the honorific term of address laohan [TD$INLINE] (‘this old man’), which is deferential but informal and semanticallyimplies that the speaker is older (and hence higher-ranking) than the addressee. Thus, he is threatened by the personnel ofthe court and at last he refers to himself in a ‘proper’ way, by using the formal self-referring form of address xiaoren [TD$INLINE]

(‘worthless person’), generally used by speakers who belong to the lower classes.Although it occurs in a rather specific institutional context, this citation demonstrates that in historical China language

users were meant to have some command of terms of address, independent of their social status. As mentioned above, thiswas due to the fact that along with its social function, deferential communication was meant to implicitly serve theseparation of the lower and higher classes of society and thus maintain the hierarchical patriarchal social order. It should benoted that here the word ‘class’ does not have any relationship withMarxist ideas: it is used in accordance with a Confuciannotion supposedly formed during the Han Dynasty. According to this notion, society is constituted by the so-called ‘FourClasses’ (Si-min [TD$INLINE] ): shi [TD$INLINE] (‘Confucian scholar’), nong [TD$INLINE] (‘peasant’), gong [TD$INLINE] (‘artisan’) and shang [TD$INLINE] (‘merchant’), shi being thehighest and shang the lowest in rank. Even though this is a simplistic and idealistic social description, it reflects thehierarchical Confucian concept of society. Although according to the Confucian ideologymoving between classes is possible,it is necessary to maintain class-difference in order to have a peaceful and effective society. Considering this socialbackground it is logical that in extract (7) the old undertaker has to be forced tomake a self-correction despite being polite ina linguistic sense: according to the norms of historical Chinese politeness everyone must communicate in accordance withher/his social role and thus maintain social order.

The fact that denigrating/elevating terms of address were regarded as (a) the basic forms of polite-deferentialcommunication, and (b) social tools to separate classes, also manifests itself in that every social class had differentinventories of terms of address. As discussed in Kadar (2005), members of low social classes and women had a small anduniform lexicon of denigrating/elevating terms by means of which they referred to themselves and addressed each other,while powerful and revered groups – i.e. members of the imperial family, officials of various rank and the Buddhist/Taoistclergy – had a large and complex inventory of terms. In other words, terms of address ‘framed’ (Goffman, 1974) the speakerand the recipient as either ‘powerful’ or ‘powerless’. Further, they also functioned as ‘resources’ from a discursiveperspective: interaction between higher classes necessitated the application of a wide variety of terms of address, and thehigher status a given person had the more sophisticated a set of address terms he had to use in discourse.

Along with terms of address, there were more sophisticated historical forms to express elevation and denigration. On alexical level, elevation and denigration could also be conveyed through verbal forms, that is, verbs that denigrate thespeaker’s action and elevate that of the addressee. For example, baiye [TD$INLINE] (‘visiting a superior with prostration’) refers to thespeaker’s visit to the addressee, and vice versa for shangguang [TD$INLINE] (‘offering one’s brightness’). Besides verbs, there wereother ‘sophisticated’ lexical tools that could express elevating/denigratingmeaning in certain contexts, even though they didnot have such a lexical meaning. The most typical example of such lexical items is the class of idiomatic expressions: e.g.bi-xue-furen [TD$INLINE] (‘to act like a servant girl who tries to behave in a ladylikemanner’) expresses a self-denigratingmeaningwhen it deferentially describes the relative inferiority of the speaker (see more in Kadar, 2010).

The use of the aforementioned ‘sophisticated’ forms of denigration/elevation required a thorough knowledge of ClassicalChinese literature, and therefore were accessible to the learned elite only.

Alongwith lexical forms, denigration/elevation also played an important role as a discursive politeness strategy in a Brownand Levinsonian (1987) sense. For example, as the following letter written by the renowned epistolary expert GongWeizhai [TD$INLINE] (1738–1811) demonstrates, honorifics, other lexical items, and discursive strategies usually ‘interacted’ in theexpression of the polite-deferential elevating/denigrating message:

(8)

[TD$INLINE]

To my nephew Wang Chengzhi

The men of ancient times wrote short letters of a few lines, and even their long epistles exceeded not a page; they
selected their wordswith skill and expressed themselves in a succinctmanner.With a verbose and tedious style onecannot achieve what Master Confucius called ‘‘concise and lucid writing’’. My humble self does not possess muchliterary skill and cannotwrite in an appropriatemanner: I can only expressmyself in a long-windedway and I knownothow towrite in a succinctmanner. Therefore,mywritings are longer than letters should be, and their style fits notthe rules of the art, and so I would not even dare to call them letters. Nevertheless, I can do naught but call them sowhenwriting thus, althoughmy ‘letters’ and thoseof the ancients areasdifferentas the twowomenof theEasternand




Western villages of the Zhuluo Mountain were: both having the name Shi but the Western Shi being beautiful
whilst the Eastern Shi was ugly. Furthermore, my letters cannot be claimed to be adequate due tomy inappropriatestyle: even theWestern Shi, whowas beautiful could have not caught the eye of the High Official Fan if she had beenclothed in filthy rags – in fact, he might have stopped his nose when passing her. If you, sir, still wish to study myletters in depth, I am afraid that you will not find any beauty in them and in reading them your sides will split withlaughter. (cited from Kadar, 2009)
Extract (8) exemplifies the aforementioned manifestation of elevation and denigration on several discursive levels. Thisletter is written to the nephew of the author who has lower rank than the author due to age difference. The ‘central’discursive message of the letter is the inappropriateness of the author’s letters compared with that of the ancients. This isexpressed by drawing an analogy between the relative quality of the author’s letters compared to those of the ancients andthe relative beauty of the so-called Western Shi (Xi Shi [TD$INLINE] ) compared with the unattractive Eastern Shi (Dong Shi [TD$INLINE] ), anancient anecdote from the Taoist Classic Zhuangzi [TD$INLINE] . And, along with this discursive strategy the author uses severalhonorifics (e.g. the self-denigrating form of address pu [TD$INLINE] , lit. ‘your servant’) and idioms, such as wanxia-wubi [TD$INLINE] (lit.‘there is no [appropriate] brush [writing] under my wrist,’ i.e. ‘cannot write in an appropriate manner’). In sum, this citationdemonstrates that deferential elevation and denigration has manifested itself on both the lexical and discourse levels.Furthermore, it also suggests that elevation/denigration, and so the command of politeness, was unequally distributed inChinese society: in order to exploit the possibilities of elevation/denigration as in the case of (8), the language user needed tohave a strong command of Classical Chinese culture.6 The complexity and unequal distribution of the elevation anddenigration phenomenon, together with the ‘framing’ nature of historical Chinese terms of address, made historical Chinesepoliteness a tool for the conversation of the Confucian hierarchical social order.

2.2.2. Ungrammaticalized honorifics

Section 2.2.1 has demonstrated that the elevation/denigration phenomenon was interwoven with Confucian socialideologies,whichmade late imperial Chinesepoliteness vulnerable toanti-Confuciancolonial andpost-colonial social changes.Another characteristic that increased its vulnerability is its ungrammaticalized nature, which made it different from e.g.Japanese and Korean politeness.7While in Japanese (and Korean Lee, 1990; Kumatani, 1990) honorific forms and inflection areprofoundly built in as awell-defined subsystemof the grammar, the large historical Chinese honorific lexicon – due to the lackof morphosyntactic changes – was not grammaticalized (see a considerably more detailed analysis in Pan and Kadar, 2011).

2.3. Summary

In the present sectionwe have overviewed the ideology and practice of historical Chinese politeness, with special focus onthose features that made it vulnerable to the large scale anti-Confucian social change created by the colonization of China inlate imperial times. Inwhat follows, let us focus on the other end of the diachronic development of Chinese politeness duringthe 19th and the 20th centuries—that is, let us explore postcolonial (contemporary) Chinese politeness.

3. Politeness in contemporary China

The purpose of this section is to analyze linguistic politeness in different units of discourse, as well as its interpersonaldistribution, anddefine theway inwhich it differs fromhistorical politeness. Fromapostcolonial perspective, the contemporaryperiod is the timewhen China became exempt from foreign imperialist and colonizing influence on a political level, and so theexaminationof this eraprovides insight into thepostcolonial state of Chinesepoliteness. Furthermore, the events that tookplaceduring theCommunist erawere stronglymotivatedby the collectivememoryof theChineseof the foreign invasionofChina, andin the political rhetoric of this time the colonizers and the traditional social elitewereusually brought under the sameumbrella.Its impacton linguisticpolitenesswasevidenced in the lossofhonorifics thatexpressedhierarchicalorderbetween interlocutorsand the adoption of revolutionary vocabulary that expressed equality and camaraderie. Although this change took place over aperiod of time ofwhatwe called ‘‘transitional period’’ (see Pan and Kadar, 2011), in this sectionwe only focus our discussion onthe end product of this change, that is, practices of politeness in contemporary Chinese.

Beforewe describe the characteristics of contemporary Chinese politeness, it is necessary to provide a brief account of thehistorical periods that we are going to cover in this section. We used the label ‘contemporary’ in this section instead of‘modern’ because historically these terms describe two very different political and social systems: ‘modern China’ is acollective term that may describe post-1911 Chinese history, while the notion of ‘contemporary China’ refers to the post-1949 history of the country after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. In terms of political and social changes, thecontemporary era includes the following 3 periods:

1949–1969: Early Communist ruling period

1969–1979: Cultural Revolution

1979–present: China’s Open Policy and Reform era (economic reform and privatization)

6 This does not mean, however, that lesser educated people did not have simpler elevating/denigrating idioms and discursive strategies.7 See more on the grammaticalization of Chinese honorifics, and their comparison with Japanese honorifics, in Peng (2000).





These periods have their distinct ideologies that affected the development of linguistic politeness behavior. It is beyond thescope of this paper to discuss the debates on ideological shift in contemporary China.What is interesting to note here is howthese waves in ideological standings affect the politeness norms and behavior to the point where contemporary Chinesepoliteness has become seemingly inconsistent to some extent, and intricate and complex for researchers to attempt todescribe. It is, therefore, necessary to give a snapshot of contemporary Chinese ideologies that depart from the traditionalones as a prelude to our description of contemporary Chinese politeness.

3.1. Ideologies for contemporary Chinese politeness

The Chinese Communist Party led byMao Zedong (1893–1976) seized political power in 1949. During the first period ofearly Communist rule (1949–1969), the main task of the new Chinese government in terms of ideology was to establish anew way of thinking and new social practice that embraced the idea of ‘equality’ in Communism. This is a transitionalperiod transferring the traditional (Neo-)Confucian ideology and other ideologies of the Republic of China to theCommunist ideology. Aswe noted earlier, the dominant ideology for politeness in imperial Chinawas Confucianism,whichprescribed norms for proper communication through the linguisticmeans of self-denigration and other-elevation. The keyconcept for politeness in (Neo-)Confucian ideology is the acknowledgement of hierarchical order between socialmembers.After the Chinese Communist Party established power in China in 1949, it launched a series of political campaigns orsocietal reforms to instill a new ideology of equality among social classes, thus directly challenging the traditional (Neo-)Confucian ideology.

During the second period of 1969–1979, which is known as the ‘Cultural Revolution’ period, the Communist ideology canbe considered at its most radical and extreme peak. The Cultural Revolutionwas launched in 1969 byMao Zedong, Chairmanof the Communist Party from 1949 to 1976, as a political and ideological campaign to denounce Chinese tradition andculture, as well as to get rid of his political opponents. During this period, (Neo-)Confucian ideology and traditional Chinesenorms of politeness behavior were demolished. The following renowned passage from Mao Zedong clearly shows whyconventional polite expressions were pushed out of use in Chinese communication:

(9)

8 Two C

contempor9 Red Gu

PleasePragma

[TD$INLINE]

[TD$INLINE] ( [TD$INLINE] )8

Revolution is not entertaining guests or having dinner parties. It is not writing a paper, nor is it working on apainting or embroidery. It cannot be done in a refined, calm and composedmanner. It cannot be done in a culturedand polite way. Nor can it be done in a temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous fashion.Revolution is a rebellion. It is a violent action by one social class against another social class.
(Mao Zedong: Report on Investigating Hunan Peasants’ Movement, March 1927)
This passage from Mao Zedong denounced every aspect of the traditional Chinese cultural view on polite behavior, such asbeing refined, kind, courteous, and restrained. This quote was chanted as a slogan by Red Guards9 during the CulturalRevolution as they raided ordinary households one after another in order to get rid of the ‘Four Olds’ (Si-jiu [TD$INLINE] ), whichinclude ‘old thinking, old customs, old culture, old tradition’ (jiu sixiang, jiu xiguan, jiu wenhua, jiu chuantong [TD$INLINE] [TD

$INLINE] ). Household items, artifacts, books, paintings that fell into these four categories were destroyed by the RedGuards. Alongwith the removal of the ‘four olds’, gone are the conventional polite expressions, as they represent old customsand tradition.

The economic reform era of 1979 to the present has witnessed a wave of new ideologies and new practices rushing intoChina from the ‘West’, and at the same time, a restoration of traditional practices as well as a yearning for the revival ofConfucian ideology. After 10 years of its isolationist policies and practices towards the external economy adopted during theCultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party implemented the so-called ‘Open Policy’ in 1979 to reform China’scentrally planned economy by introducing foreign trade, foreign investment, and a market economy to China. With thearrival of foreign trade and foreign capital, there rushed in countless foreign goods and practices, McDonald’s, and Karaokebars. Transition in social practices leads to ideological shift. Disillusionment amongst the Chinese, especially the youngergeneration, with the Communist ideology has left ‘‘an ideological vacuum which the Party has been slow to fill. In themeantime the youth have turned towards music, dance, religion and materialism.’’ (Howell, 1993:251). This is the period inwhich the old, the new, the Chinese, and the Western ideologies are all present and competing. This shift in ideology has ahuge impact on Chinese politeness behavior and the use of linguistic politeness in social interaction; however, historicalChinese politeness has not been revived in its original state and contemporary politeness continues to be largely differentfrom its historical counterpart.

hinese writing systems (traditional and simplified Chinese) are used in this paper with the purpose of representing both historical and

ary Chinese.ards were civilians, mostly students and other young people, who were mobilized by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution.





3.2. Politeness practice in contemporary China

Having laid out the landscape of postcolonial ideological change in contemporary China, we are now turning to politenesspractice since 1949 and compare it with historical politeness. It should be noted that although the system of Chinese addressterms is part of the Chinese lexicon, it has its own unique characteristics and retains a special place in Chinese politeness. Itembraces the concept of self-denigration and other-elevation in traditional Chinese. Thereforewewill dealwith it separatelybefore discussing lexical and syntactic issues on a more general level.

3.2.1. Terms of address

The system of terms of address in contemporary Chinese has seen the most drastic change after the People’s Republic ofChina was founded in 1949: the elaborate historical Chinese system of honorifics and the denigration and elevation terms ofaddress collapsedwithin a short period of time, andwas replaced by a single, uniform, and unisex term of address tongzhi [TD$INLINE](‘comrade’).10 Historically, the Chinese Communist Party adopted this term of address in order to express its associationwiththe Soviet Communists; during pre-1949 times, this term had been used within the Communist Party and the Communist-led military forces, but it was never used at a societal level as a common term of address. It gained ‘popularity’ between the1950s and the 1970s and was gradually made the official term of address in formal and official occasions, as well as acommon term of address in social settings.

From a sociolinguistic point of view, tongzhi has various ideological and social as well as politeness implications. Itsideological and social implications are in line with the Chinese Communist Party’s egalitarian ideals of the ‘new’ social orderand promotion of equality among its members in particular, and society in general. In terms of politeness implications, thisterm of address appeals to the ‘positive face’ of the hearer and focuses on the claim of solidarity. The introduction of this newterm of address signals the demolition of the long-held tradition of the hierarchical system of terms of address, whichpresupposed some interpersonal distance and difference in rank even when appealing to positive face.11

With tongzhi as an overarching term of address formost social occasions, there appeared a variety of sub-system terms ofaddress that were used to satisfy different socio-pragmatic requirements. One such requirement is the acknowledgement ofhierarchical structure (power) that has long existed in China. The second requirement is the need for acknowledgement ofsolidarity or familiarity among group members or between the speaker and the hearer. According to Scotton and Zhu(1983:484–485), there is a variety of usage for tongzhi:

Tongzhi (title alone): ‘comrade’

Wang tongzhi (surname + title): ‘Comrade Wang’

Wang Weiguo tongzhi (full name + title): ‘Comrade Wang Weiguo’

Zhuren tongzhi (two titles): ‘Comrade Director’

It is also possible to use tongzhiwith a first name, especially from superior to inferior or between people of equal standing informal letters as a sign of closeness. When power difference12 is present, the hierarchy structure is signaled through otherlinguistic devices. One commonway to do this is adding a prefix before a surname to indicate age difference, as in the case ofthe following two examples:

Lao-Zhang tongzhi [TD$INLINE] (‘Old Comrade Zhang’)

Xiao-Li tongzhi [TD$INLINE] (‘Little Comrade Li’).

Notice here that in China, seniority in age is respected and is one-step higher in the hierarchical structure in a dyadicinteraction. Therefore, the first one is a deferential term showing respect to the addressee, while the second is a term ofendearment to show benevolence from someone in a position higher than that of the addressee.

Since tongzhidenoted a revolutionary tone, after 1979 (the onset of China’smarket-oriented reforms) the status of this termhas gradually decreased, and the term itself has been falling out of daily usage,13 although it remains in use as a respectful termof public address among middle-aged Chinese and members of the Communist Party of China. Within the Communist Party,failure to address a fellow member as tongzhi is still seen as a subtle but unmistakable sign of disrespect and enmity.

With the decline of tongzhi job title has become another common way to indicate power difference in official ranking,such as Li juzhang [TD$INLINE] (‘Bureau Chief Li’) and Li laoshi [TD$INLINE] (‘Teacher Li’). More precisely, job titles were reintroduced

10 It should be noted that previously this termwas not the ‘property’ of the Communists: the Kuomintang [TD$INLINE] (‘Nationalist Party’) also had a tradition of

using it in order to refer to its members, usually as a noun rather than a title. But the Nationalist Party later abandoned it, in order to distance themselves

from the Communists.11 For example, huixiong [TD$INLINE] (lit. ‘wise elder brother’) appeals to the addressee’s positive face but it also presupposes some difference in rank between the

interactants, due to the fact that an elder brother is higher ranking than the younger. Similarly, forms such as laodi [TD$INLINE] (‘older younger-brother’) appeal to

the addressee’s positive face and social rank but also implicitly convey that the speaker is somewhat higher-ranking than the recipient, at least on the basis

of age difference.12 The power difference can be attributed to age, rank, or social status.13 In fact, as Yuan (2004) demonstrates, it is possible that tongzhi’s decline started even before this time: during the civil war-like state during the ‘Cultural

Revolution’ it became dangerous to be associatedwith others as ‘comrades’ due to the fact that political power frequently changed amongst political groups.





because this way of addressing was not only popular during Republican times but also had historical Chinese roots. Incontemporary times, the use of job title as a term of address was first confined to the workplace, in particular, governmentalorganizations or official settings, sometimes together with tongzhi prior to the 1980s. On the surface, job title as a term ofaddress does not connote power differentiation. However, in a culture that traditionally categorized trades and professionsin a social hierarchical scale, what someone does for living places that person in a murky system of hierarchy.

When solidarity and familiarity are strong, there are a number of forms that can be used in contemporary Chinese. Onecommon usage is the kinship terms such as da-ge [TD$INLINE] (‘big brother’). Kinship terms can be used in all social interactions tosignal solidarity and familiarity or as a politeness strategy to claim closeness. For example, in Pan’s studies (Pan, 1995,2000b), she found that the kinship term a-sao [TD$INLINE] (‘sister-in-law’) was used strategically by sales persons in privately ownedstores in South China to claim familiarity with the customer as a way to show politeness and to persuade the customer. Itshould be noted that the class of kinship terms is perhaps the most ‘conservative’ in the category of terms of address, that is,many of the historical forms of kin address were preserved in modern Chinese. In fact, familiar forms of address have a longhistory in Chinese (see Lin, 1998) and they have been thoroughly studied by historical Chinese philologists (see Kadar, 2007).Their importance continued into modern times and also after the Communist takeover, due to the fact that while theCommunist leadership aimed to reform family life, family continued and continues to be the perhaps most traditional socialunit (cf. Freedman, 1958). Yet, even the familiar lexicon was not preserved intact. Firstly, the number of familiar forms ofaddress critically decreased, partly because the size of families also decreased. Furthermore, the traditionally complexsystem of family honorifics largely disappeared from the colloquial: historically, speakers had to use different forms ofaddress when referring to their or the addressee’s inmates, and also there were gender-specific ways of referring to familymembers, for example, a wife had to use a specific honorific lexicon towards the members of her husband’s family and viceversa for the husband (Yuan, 1994/2004). Although some elements of the historical system remain, e.g. it is still a custom topolitely refer to one speech partner’s father as fuqin [TD$INLINE] (lit. ‘father relative’) and not simply by using the ‘in-family form’ baba[TD$INLINE] (‘father’), such lexical items are few in number. Secondly, many of the denigrating/elevating familiar forms of addressdisappeared from the colloquial, in particular self-denigrating familiar forms became unusual: for example, it would beanachronistic to refer to one’s own son in a denigrating way as xiaoquan [TD$INLINE] (lit. ‘small dog’) in modern times.

In sum, contemporary Chinese terms of address differ from their historical counterparts: they are less explicitlyhierarchical on the semantic level, even though they can be used tomaintain hierarchy. Also, in a certain respect their properuse necessitates a more complex undertaking than that was required by historical terms of address, which were designed toacknowledge social power: the contemporary Chinese speaker must find the proper form of address through utilization ofvarious and not explicitly-settled sociopragmatic norms. In fact, some of the traditional terms of address re-appeared inChinese communication during the reform period from 1979 to the present. For example, the traditional way of addressingmales as xiansheng [TD$INLINE] (‘Mr.’) and females as xiaojie [TD$INLINE] (‘Miss’) regained popularity in the 1980s due to an upsurge in contactwith overseas business people. However, these terms do not express elevation, unlike in historical texts, and also such formsare small in number. Furthermore, self-denigrating honorifics have largely disappeared from colloquial language, as we canalso see in the case of familiar forms of address.

3.2.2. Conventional politeness expressions at lexical and syntactic level

As we already discussed in section 2, in historical China self-denigration/other elevation not only manifested itself inaddress terms but also in other lexical items and conventional polite expressions. One phenomenon worth noting is thatChinese politeness is traditionally represented mainly by lexical items. Unlike many ‘Western’ languages where politenesscan be indicated by a change in syntactic structure, such as the use of question format or various conventional indirectnessformats, historical Chinese politeness utilized its elaborate honorific lexical items to signal politeness appropriate to thehierarchical structure between the interlocutors. Conventional politeness in Chinese is more often observed at the lexicallevel than the syntactic. Empirical studies on Chinese indirectness (Zhang, 1995) show that ‘‘rules operating on thedirectness-indirectness distinctionwere different in English and Chinese’’ (p. 82).While English indirectness ismanifested atthe syntactic level, the representation of Chinese indirectness occurs at the discourse level, realized either by small talk orsupportive moves. Another observation made by Zhang (1995) is that Chinese indirectness is often associated withinformation sequencing, which was also supported by Scollon and Scollon’s (1991:115) description of topic instruction inAsian cultures. That is, ‘‘the Chinese and other Asians generally defer the introduction of the topic until after a considerableperiod of small talk.’’ They labeled this speech behavior as the ‘‘inductive pattern of topic introduction’’, as opposed to the‘‘deductive pattern of topic introduction’’ (Scollon and Scollon, 1995:75). This speech pattern and indirectness rules inChinese point to the fact that polite lexicon and discursive strategies play a more crucial role in Chinese politeness thandiffering syntactic structuring of an indirect sentence.

Keeping inmind the richness and importance of polite lexicon in Chinese politeness phenomenon, let us now consider thechange and loss of many of the polite lexical expressions and the impact on Chinese politeness behavior. With the change inpolitical system and social order in 1949, there eruptedmassive changes in linguistic politeness. There were some dominantforces influencing language use change in the Communist era (Chi, 1956): a desire for progression to transform the ‘oldChina’ into a ‘new China’; a functional purpose—‘‘the natural pressure for new terms and expressions brought forth by newpolitical and social needs’’ (Chi, 1956:12); and themobilization of the ‘voice of themasses’, which at least as the Communistsclaimed had previously been unheard. The use of traditional polite lexicon was thus seen as a reflection or reminder of ‘oldChina’. Thus, the extensive traditional honorific lexiconwas dropped. Furthermore, even conventional polite expressions such





asqing [TD$INLINE] (‘please’), xiexie [TD$INLINE] (‘thankyou’), andduibuqi [TD$INLINE] (‘sorry’)were seenas indicative of ‘oldChina’ andwere reserved foruse in very formal communication or in writing only, and for daily interaction it was regarded as old-fashioned or even petit

bourgeois touse them.Asa result ‘commonspeech’, that is, speech style that theCommunist rulers of the country interpreted asthe styleof the ‘masses’ (workers, peasants, soldierandstudents),washeldas the standard. Fromasociolinguisticpointof view,so-called ‘common speech’ should not be viewed as less polite or less effective, as language use does vary by social classes andgroups (seeLabov’s, 1972authoritativeworkon this theme).What is interesting in theChinese case is that ‘commonspeech’ is aterm equivalent to speech that employs lexical itemswith strong revolutionary flavor, suggestive of the communist ideology.This trend of the Communist policy of language use embraced the idea of the deliberatemanipulation of the language to carryout ‘psychological warfare’. As Chi (1956:23–25) notes, this includes among other things the usage of:

� ‘‘
militant vocabulary’’ applied to everyday usage, and � ‘‘ extravagant terms both in praise and blame’’ (grandiosity).
During the 1980s this tendency was changed, and militant language use has gradually disappeared from colloquiallanguage. However, Chinese remained exempt from polite formulas, not mentioning the historical honorific lexicon, andsuch formulas occur mainly in the speech of the ‘powerless’ party in a discourse interaction. One example to illustrate this isservice encounter interactions. A service encounter is an interaction in the public domain, with a person (customer)requesting a service, and another person (service person) rendering a service. This kind of social interaction normallyconsists of a request for a business transaction or service, and entails the use of ritual politeness in American and BritishEnglish speaking cultures, including opening remarks (e.g. ‘Can I help you?’) and pre-closing and closing remarks (e.g. ‘Thankyou’) rendered by the service person as well as the customer (Merritt, 1976, 1984). Linguistic politeness is applied in serviceencounters as a means of smoothing the process of business transaction and social interaction between two strangers.However, the empirical studies of Pan (1997, 2000a,b) and Sun (2005, 2008) demonstrate that ritual greetings between theservice person and the customer, pre-closing remarks of thanks, and closing remarks are frequently missing in Chineseservice encounter interactions, particularly in state-run businesses (although recently this situation has somewhatchanged). If politeness occurs between the customer and the service person, it is unreciprocated – more precisely it is thecustomerwho tends tomake an effort to employ politeness strategies in the interaction. Sun attributes the asymmetrical useof politeness to the institutional power that the service person has in such an interaction. In other words, in contemporaryChina the person who has power tends to avoid the use of polite formulas (see more in section 3.2.4).

In sum, in a way similar to the terms of address in section 3.2.1, there is a major difference between historical andcontemporary Chinese politeness on the level of other lexical items: historical Chinese honorifics, together with politeformulas, have disappeared from colloquial Chinese. Although politeness markers occur in cases, they are limited to thespeech of the ‘powerless’ parties in institutional interactions.

3.2.3. Politeness at discourse level

The diminishing and gradual disappearance of honorifics and other polite lexical items boosted the application ofdiscursive strategies in interactions to indicate politeness. This aspect of politeness communication became the mostimportantmeans of conveying politeness, particularly in informal situations and daily interactions. This phenomenon is inline with Goffman’s view that deference and tact have a sociological significance altogether beyond the level of tablemanners and etiquette books (Goffman, 1971:90) and Brown and Levinson’s original view that politeness concerns thefoundations of human social life and interaction (Brownand Levinson, 1987:1). In otherwords, in spite of the destruction ofthe traditional politeness system in Chinese, interpersonal interaction still requires some form of politeness to meet thesociopragmatic requirements of power and distance. Social interactions still need some form of linguistic strategy toregulate the relationship between the speaker and the addressee. The shift from honorifics and lexical politeness todiscursive strategies is a response to the change in Chinese society at the time on the one hand, and on the other hand, anattempt tomeet the requirements of social interaction. It should be noted thatwe do not intend to suggest that in historicalChinese discursive strategies did not exist, but rather that they co-existed with honorifics and so even if they wereimportant theywere not as salient as inmodern times. In fact, the prominent role of strategies can be well-observed in thehistorical letter cited above (cf. extract 8), but, to provide a dialogical example, it is pertinent to cite again the followingsentence from (7):

[TD$INLINE]

Your honor today have what order? (literal translation)

How can I serve Your Honor?

In this sentence situated in a courtroom, the old undertaker makes use of the question form, along with using the honorificformof address taiye [TD$INLINE] (‘your honour’) and also he strategically speaks about the recipient’s ‘order’ (fenfu [TD$INLINE] ) instead of e.g.‘request’ (yaoqiu [TD$INLINE] ), in order to strategically express deference towards the magistrate.

Some of the most frequently used Chinese discursive strategies include question-answer pattern, topic control, speakingturns, small talk, code-switching, joking tone, bantering, irony, teasing, or mockery. These strategies are used, in place of





traditional honorifics or lexical politeness, to achieve the interactional goal and the sociological factors of power and distanceidentified in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model.

An example of such strategies is small talk, which has a significant role in discursive politeness in Chinese face-to-faceinteraction. Zhang (1995) noticed that small talk (e.g., conversation on topics other than those related to the intended action)is a central component of Chinese indirectness when redressing a ‘face-threatening act’ such as a request. Small talk evenbecame part of the ritual greetings in daily life. For example, expressions like Chi le ma? [TD$INLINE] ? (‘Have you eaten?’, i.e. ‘Howare you?’) and [TD$INLINE] [TD$INLINE] Ni qu nar? (‘Where have you been?’) were used as a greeting between acquaintances in contemporaryChinese up to the reform period. These phatic expressions originally functioned as ‘small talk’ and gradually becameritualized in social interaction.

Another example to summarize how discursive politeness takes precedence over lexical politeness in contemporaryChinese comes from Pan’s study (Pan et al., 2002) on a consultation with an American telecommunications company. Theconsultation was on monitoring the professionalism and politeness of the company’s Chinese-speaking salesrepresentatives. The training manager of the telecommunications company was trying to get their Chinese-speakingsales representatives to use politenessmarkers such as the equivalents of English ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ whenmaking salespitches. The sales representatives were given a Chinese script translated from the English, and they were rated on a scale of0–3 based on whether they used these politeness markers at every possible point in the conversation where it would beappropriate in American English. They got 3 points if they did this in a ‘natural’ manner. During the 3 days of performanceevaluation, 10 Chinese-speaking sales representatives weremonitored. Of these 10 people, 9 got 0 points for politeness levelbecause they failed to use ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ in their conversationwith Chinese customers. Only one person got 1 pointout of 3 for this item. As a result they all failed in their performance evaluation because their politeness level was not up tothe company’s standards. However, the calls monitored were polite by Chinese standards, and most of the salesrepresentatives succeeded in signing up their customers for the company’s service. This example demonstrates that it is notnatural to use conventional expressions in contemporary Chinese conversations. These terms are reserved mostly for use invery formal occasions because they sound too formal to the extent that they create a large social distance between the 2speakers. If sales representativeswere to use these polite terms excessively in their conversationwith customers, theywouldsound ‘fishy’ and could give the impression that theywere setting up a trap to get customers to buy a service. So in spite of therigid training, the Chinese-speaking sales representatives still refused to use them, and instead they applied otherexpressions that were commonly found in contemporary Chinese communication, including repetition of verbs, adjectivephrases, tag questions, small talk, tone of voice, intonation, rate of speech, and even pauses. This example shows that the useof conventional polite expressions or polite lexicon is associated with formality and asymmetrical power relationships. As aresult, its usage entails other negative meanings or associations, such as distancing, fakeness, pretentiousness, or aloofness.

3.2.4. Asymmetrical use of politeness

Along with the manifestation of politeness at the different levels of discourse, another domain where the contemporarydiffers from the historical is the interpersonal distribution of politeness. The analysis of this issue demonstrates that thedemolition of the Chinese linguistic honorific system did not lead to a fundamental change in the ideological view regardinghierarchy. The traditional hierarchical structure was simply replaced by a new hierarchical view of linguistic interactions.Therefore discursive tools are applied in contemporary social interactions to satisfy the socio-pragmatic requirements ofacknowledgement of power differences and social distance.

Scollon and Scollon ([1995] 2001) were among the first group of scholars to point out a unique characteristic of Chinesepoliteness, i.e. the asymmetrical use of politeness strategies between the interlocutors, which they define as the‘hierarchical’ politeness system. That is, there is always some kind of hierarchical order between two speakers incontemporary Chinese interactions, in a similar way to the historical setting (Kadar, 2007). The hierarchy can be based onrank, age, gender, social status. The person in the higher position of the hierarchical order uses one set of politeness strategies(usually ‘positive politeness’ or ‘involvement strategies’), and the person in the lower position uses another set of politenessstrategies (usually ‘negative politeness’ or ‘independence strategies’). This hierarchical politeness system is based on therecognition of and respect for social differences that place one in a super-ordinate position and the other in a subordinateposition (Scollon and Scollon, 2001:55).

An interesting outcome of empirical studies of contemporary Chinese interactions is that the asymmetrical power relationalso leads to the lack of politeness on the part of an interlocutor who is in a super-ordinate position. This has systematicdifferences from historical Chinese politeness or the ‘hierarchical politeness system’ as described by Scollon and Scollon. Inhistorical Chinese politeness or the hierarchical politeness system, both partieswould use different politeness expressions, notthe lack of politeness, for the sake of ritual self-display and, alternatively, to acknowledge their interpersonal relationship (seePan and Kadar, 2011). For example, as Kadar (2008) argues, even in the rather hierarchical historical courtroom settings themagistrates were institutionally obliged to use honorifics in order to avoid being looked upon as ‘oppressive officials’ bythe public. But in contemporary Chinese politeness communication, the lack of politeness is often observed in the speech ofthe ‘powerful’ (i.e., the person higher in the hierarchy) and in that the use of conventional polite expressions is associatedwith the ‘powerless,’ i.e. the person lower in the hierarchy (see Pan, 1995, 2000a,b; Sun, 2008).

For example, Sun (2008) demonstrates that when the service person is associated with an institution and thus isperceived asmore ‘powerful,’ there is a tendency for them to simply use a ‘bald on-record’ strategy and the customer tends touse more polite expressions in getting the service. Pan’s studies (Pan, 1995, 2000a,b) show that this phenomenon is widely





observed across the social settings of official and business meetings, family gatherings, and service encounters. A morerecent study conducted by Pan et al. (2006) has reconfirmed this finding. In that project, we interviewed 24 recent Chineseimmigrants residing in the United States on their perception of translated documents issued by the United States CensusBureau.We asked our Chinese-speaking respondents to review a survey letter signed by the U.S. Census Bureau director. Thefirst paragraph of the letter states:

Dear Resident:

The U.S. Census Bureau is conducting the American Community Survey. A Census Bureau representative will contactyou to help you complete the survey. I would appreciate your help, because the success of this survey depends on you.

From our interviews with recent Chinese immigrants and debriefing sessions with Chinese language experts from theresearch teamwhoconducted the interviews,we found that theChinese respondents commented that the letterwaswritten inan overtly polite tone because the director of a government agencywould never thank the people, nor show open appreciationto the people. This finding illustrates that politeness is related to the perceived power relation. In a way, the use of traditionalpolite expressions is a symbol of the ‘powerless’ – to be used to plead for something. Thus it is not a very desirable thing toemploy linguistic politeness in social interaction. In other words, contemporary Chinese ‘politeness’ communication is a one-way street: there is an obvious lack of politeness on the part of the ‘powerful’ inmany settings. The conventional polite lexiconor expressions are used by the ‘powerless’ or are reserved for very formal occasions. Thus they can function to distance orclassify speakers. This phenomenon of asymmetrical use of politeness can be puzzling tomanywho view politeness as a two-way street, and it makes contemporary Chinese politeness different from its historical counterpart.

The examination of the differences between contemporary and historical politeness in section 3 has demonstrated theimpact of sociopragmatic diachronic changes that took place between the colonization of China and contemporary times. Inwhat follows, let us briefly conclude this paper.

4. Conclusion

The present paper has contributed to politeness research and postcolonial pragmatic studies by looking into the majorgap that exists between historical and contemporary Chinese politeness. It can be argued that this unprecedented large-scalediachronic change was generated primarily by the foreign invasion of the country during the 1840s and the following fewdecades, which has directly influenced the history of the country until the second half of the 1940s, but indirectly continuedto influence Communist thinking and rhetoric. In fact, we can only show indirect evidence for the influence of the foreigninvasion and partial colonization of the country, due to limitation on space, that is, the existence of a gap between historicaland contemporary Chinese politeness. Nevertheless, the existence of this gap and the coincidence of the birth of this gapwiththe timewhen Chinawas first invaded byWestern powers seem to us to confirm the conclusion that the phenomena studiedfits into postcolonial theorizations. With this in mind, it can be claimed that the large-scale changes in politeness norms andpractice, which have been explored by the present work, represent a noteworthy example of the influence of colonization onnative cultures and languages.

The present work has also contributed to politeness research by demonstrating that although the practice of politenesshas been changed in modern China, one cannot claim that the collapse of the historical practice actually meant thedisappearance or simplification of Chinese politeness. In fact, from some perspectives modern Chinese politeness can evenbe claimed to be more complex than its historical counterpart. Although we did not have enough space to analyze this issue,it should bementioned here that this replacement of the ‘old’ systemwith a similarly complex ‘new’ one does not mean thatthe changes lead to functionally equivalent systems. Consequently, historical and contemporary emic interpretations of‘politeness’ differ considerably. For example, modern terms of address that express positive politeness through emphasizingequality and in-group relationship between speaker and addressee, such as pengyou [TD$INLINE] [TD$INLINE] (‘friend’) might not have beenevaluated as ‘polite’ in historical interactions necessitating politeness.

In fact, this paper has a limited scope and many issues that would be relevant from the perspective of postcolonialpragmatics have remained untouched. Among these issues perhaps the most important is the in-depth analysis of theinfluence of the colonization on native Chinese ideals of politeness. Another issue is the comparison of Chinese politenessnorms, aswell as the evaluation of certainmanifestations of ‘politeness’, across social sub-groups. Such issueswill be studiedin a later work (Pan and Kadar, 2011).

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the anonymous referees of this paper for their invaluable comments. We alsoowe a great deal of gratitude to Eric A. Anchimbe for his continuous support. Our gratitude goes to BenMousley for checkingthe style of the paper. All the remaining errors rest with the authors.

This research used some data that came out of a project funded by the U.S. Census Bureau, for which Yuling Pan is deeplygrateful. However, the views expressed in the paper are that of the author and do not reflect those of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Daniel Z. Kadar would like to express his gratitude to the following two organizations for their kind support: TheHungarian Scientific Research Fund (‘OTKA’), whose Post-doctoral Research Grant (PD 71628) made it possible for him to





devote his time to the research of Chinese politeness; and The Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International ScholarlyExchange (CCKF), Taiwan, whose long-term Research Grant (RG003-U-07) provided the necessary financial backing forfieldtrips and book acquisitions.

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Yuling Pan is a Sociolinguist at the U.S. Census Bureau, where she leads the Language andMeasurement Research Group. Her research interests include linguisticpoliteness, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, and multilingual survey research. She has published widely in the field ofsociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication, and surveymethods research. Her publications include Politeness in Chinese Face-to-Face Interaction (Ablex, 2000),Professional Communication in International Settings (co-authoredwith Suzanne Scollon and Ron Scollon, Blackwell, 2002), Politeness in Historical and ContemporaryChinese (co-authored with Daniel Z. Kadar, Continuum, 2010), Chinese Discourse and Interaction: Theory and Practice (co-edited with Daniel Z. Kadar, Equinox,2011).

Daniel Z. Kadar is a Research Fellow at Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His fields of interest include linguistic (im)politeness (with focus on East Asia), discourse analysis, historical and contemporary sociopragmatics, and Chinese letter writing. His recent publications includevolumes such as Politeness in East Asia (co-edited with Sara Mills, CUP), Historical Chinese Letter Writing (Continuum), Politeness across Cultures (co-edited withFrancesca Bargiela-Chiappini, PalgraveMacmillan), Politeness in China and Japan (co-written withMichael Haugh, John Benjamins), and Politeness in Historical andContemporary Chinese (co-written with Yuling Pan, Continuum), as well as papers in different journals of international standing such as Journal of PolitenessResearch.



Historical vs. contemporary Chinese linguistic politeness (Journal of Pragmatics, 2010)

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