Flattery in historical China

Abstract In this study we examine how flattery was realised in historical Chinese interactions. We bring together ritual, speech acts and interaction, studying a corpus of interactions drawn from the late imperial satirical novel Guanchang Xianxing Ji 官场现形记 (‘Officialdom Unmasked’). Many claims have been made about the prevalence of flattery in Chinese social interaction, in particular in historical China. Since little language-anchored research has been dedicated to flattery in historical Chinese, this study fills a knowledge gap. We conducted a tripartite analysis focusing on: (1) how flattery in historical Chinese can be defined, (2) how flattery was conventionally realised, and (3) how flattery was conventionally responded to. We also investigated how flattery relates to the phenomena of self-denigration/other-elevation and complimenting in Chinese.