Contrastive Rhetoric: An American Writing Teacher in China

A recent delegation of American businessmen, trying to establish trade contacts in China, presented their hosts with generous gifts of cheddar cheese. The Americans were clearly unaware that the Chinese consider cheese disgusting and inedible, not fit for consumption. Such missteps and social blunders are all too common in Chinese-American interactions. Well-meaning people of good will all too often offend or confuse each other, and the causes are generally more complex than differences in taste. Rather, they are the result of speakers coming from entirely different cultures and approaching each other with entirely different systems of rhetoric. If we define rhetoric as a way of thinking about the relationships that exist among speaker, subject matter, purpose, and audience, then we might think of rhetoric as the verbal equivalent of ecology, the study of the relationships that exist between an organism and its environment. Both rhetoric and ecology are disciplines that emphasize the inescapable and, to a great extent, decisive influence of local conditions.