Understanding the Conceptual Basis of the ‘Old Friend’ Formula in Chinese Social Interaction and Foreign Diplomacy: A Cultural Script Approach

Abstract

This study attempts to make sense of a Chinese diplomatic formula—calling or labelling one's counterpart zhōngguó rénmín de lăopéngyóu 中国人民的老朋友 (‘an old friend of the Chinese people’)—by unravelling its conceptual basis. It shows that this formula has deep roots in Chinese social practices, and that its use is governed by a web of intrinsically-linked cultural scripts. The paper articulates these scripts in terms of the culture-independent Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), unveiling the cultural logic underlying the use of the expression and revealing the culturally distinctive Chinese way of categorizing and conceptualizing ‘friend’, which is different from the Anglophone way. On the one hand, the paper shows the crucial role that language plays in managing interpersonal relationships by Chinese speakers; on the other, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the conceptual foundations of Chinese diplomatic style, illustrating how formulaic language in diplomacy highlights aspects of social cognition that are fundamental to the speakers of a community, and therefore deserving more attention than has hitherto been the case.

Keywords:

• Cultural Scripts
• Social Cognition
• Formulaic Language
• Conceptions of Friends
• Chinese Model of Social Interaction
• Diplomatic Language
• Corpus Techniques

Notes

¹ Renmin Ribao, known in the West as People's Daily, is a Party newspaper in Mainland China. The Renmin Ribao digital database is therefore genre-specific and one would expect to find in it a high frequency of zhōngguó rénmín de lăopéngyóu (‘old friend of the Chinese people’). The CCL corpora are comprised of two databases (Modern Chinese and Ancient Chinese) and have 477 million characters in total. Most of the search for this study was carried out in the Modern Chinese database. Its source texts range from newspaper articles to literary work. The use of Baidu, which occupies 70% of the search engine market in Mainland China, complements the other two small corpora; see Mair (2006) and Wierzbicka (2009) on the value of combining small and large corpora in studying linguistic phenomena. In Baidu, because both the expressions lăopéngyóu (‘old friend’) and hăopěngyóu (‘good friend’) exceed one million hits, it does not give a specific number. N/A means that the search was unsuccessful because it brought up a large number of neighbouring expressions. All of the translations of the excerpts from the Renmin Ribao digital database are mine.

² The Collins Wordbanks English (online) gives the following frequency figures: good (including best) friend—8,951; good (including best) friends—2,962; close (including closest) friend—5,220; close (including closest) friends—2,419; old friend—4,339; old friends—1,663. These figures suggest that in English ‘good’ and ‘close’ friend(s) are more frequently talked about than ‘old friend(s)’, contrary to the situation in Chinese.

³ Fei Xiaotong, a student of Malinowski, is the founding father of Chinese anthropology and sociology.

⁴ These scripts show that social categories are embedded in the shared knowledge of the Chinese speakers as to the ways in which they should interact with other people. In NSM theory, these ready-made terms (which can be fully decomposed into semantic primes) function as semantic molecules (Goddard 2012b).

⁵ See Ye (2004) for a discussion of how these social categories influence Chinese pragmatic acts and Chinese notions of ‘(im)politeness’. See Kipnis (1997) for discussions on the ubiquitous ‘small rituals’, such as ‘guesting and hosting’, banqueting and gift-giving, which are conducive to producing and reproducing guanxi (‘relationship’).

⁶ Adding to this are two encounters from the present author's own experience. Once when I returned to my hometown, someone who was a colleague of my ‘old classmate’ said to me at a gathering that ‘we are old friends, don't make yourself an outsider’. I previously only spoke to this person a few times. The other example was from an unsolicited email I received from someone I did not know, which contained some propaganda material. The sender signed the email as lăopéngyóu (‘old friend’).

⁷ The four categories and the two master scripts discussed here concern horizontal relationships. Social categories denoting vertical, hierarchical relationships are also constituents of the model. However, it seems that in everyday Chinese social interaction a great deal of energy is channelled towards the horizontal relationships exactly because, unlike hierarchical social relations where boundaries between categories are fixed, horizontal relations can be engineered, negotiated and manipulated. Research on Chinese pragmatics, communication and negotiation styles has also highlighted the primacy of horizontal relations in Chinese social relations. For example, Yuling Pan (2000: 20) comes to the conclusion that ‘Chinese tend to employ different politeness strategies depending first on their knowledge of the addressee and then on the situation’. In studies on the psychology of the Chinese people (e.g. Gao et al. 1996), ‘inside effects’ are cited as playing an important role in Chinese social interaction. Pye's (1982) study also shows that the hierarchical relationship within a Chinese negotiation team seems to succumb to an insider relationship.

⁸ See Matteo Ricci's (2009/1595) Yóulùn (Essay on Friends, whose title was later changed to Jiāoyóulùn Essay on Friendship), the first book to be written in Chinese by a European, for a fascinating ‘synthesis’ of earlier European and Chinese ideas about ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’. Ricci was not only one of the best known Jesuit missionaries in China, but also the first European to be allowed into the Imperial court.

⁹ As mentioned earlier péngyóu₂ is pitted against ‘enemy’. It is a group concept. In this respect, it is very different from péngyóu₁, which is a relational concept. The top component ‘some people’ attempts to reflect this.