Introduction

The present chapter explores some aspects of the discourse about and the performative practice of greeting gestures in European–Chinese intercultural communication, particularly focusing on the turn-of-the-century period around 1900, when the expiring Qing empire was under pressure internationally and there were strong tensions in the mutual perception. This essay is not just about different and changing forms or styles of greeting gestures, but involves different conceptions of what ‘etiquette’ actually signified. These divergences have offered ample opportunities for misunderstandings, and indeed also failures, in Chinese–European intercultural encounters. As Ralf Hertel and Michael Keevak have argued, not only was it the case that Western visitors to East Asia often ‘failed to read the signs of cultural difference’, but East Asians ‘were repeatedly at a similar loss in their (first) encounters with Western culture’.

While the challenge of alterity and the limits of mutual understanding were, and to some degree even nowadays still are, among the basic conditions of intercultural communication, the elements of negotiation and accommodation nevertheless must not be underestimated, either. In an intercultural encounter, an agreement on the use of certain forms of greeting gesture, too, is typically the result of a process of negotiation with its own implicit rules and cultural scripts, and involves the choice between two different, though mutually exclusive, paradigms of forms. Failure or success in such interactions can often be assessed only if compared with the underlying expectations and the mutual hopes and fears. While this chapter introduces diverging perspectives on failure in the field of intercultural etiquette, it necessarily problematises and renders ambiguous the notion of ‘failure’ as such. What may seem a failure from one perspective may be perceived as success from another, and vice versa, depending on the mutual evaluation of a situation but also contingent on powerful interests and pressures. Moreover, the often ambiguous outcomes tend to be subject to representational and discursive strategies reframing failure as success, as a way to save one's ‘face’ or to defend one's collective ‘honour’.

A recapitulation of shifting European attitudes towards the kotow serves as the starting point. The depreciation, even condemnation, of the kotow throughout the nineteenth century became something of an obsession in the Western (i.e. European and Northern American) discourse about China.