Emancipating Chinese (im)politeness research: Looking back and looking forward

Chinese data have been frequently used as a testing ground of Western theories of (im)politeness. While making significant progress, most of the existing studies still concentrate on the dominant Confucianist social norms and analyze a limited number of variants of face-to-face and mediated interactional contexts. By adopting an emancipatory approach to (im)politeness research, we seek to broaden the scope of Chinese (im)politeness research. In this paper, we review the major studies of Chinese (im)politeness published in English and Chinese outlets from the emancipation of theories of (im)politeness, research methods, and contextual variations. The results show evidence for both the Same Position and the Different Position in the East-West debate at various levels of analysis. We argue that scholars should further examine underlying assumptions held by researchers and interlocutors, constructing generalized models for contrastive analysis and seeking for cross-fertilization between Chinese and Western politeness theories. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.