The Impression Management Perspective Of Chinese Modesty

Modesty is viewed as a virtue in China. In the Chinese language, there are all kinds of modest terms. Modest language has been generally applied by the Chinese people in the daily communication, literature and letters, with these terms people want to achieve the best expression and the most successful communication. Westerners also regard modesty as a highly-valued attribute. The existing linguistic studies on modesty mainly focus on the pragmatic classification of Chinese terms of respect and modesty, cultural comparison in different languages, the operating mechanism and characteristics of Chinese terms of respect and modesty, social functions, application principles and restricting factors. There are also studies on the social functions of modesty in the sociological field. Studies on reasons for Chinese people being modest are mainly carried out in the social psychological field. Liu Hongli (2001) studied the reasons why Chinese people like to be modest. Liu holds, according to Erving Goffman's (1955) theory of face-work, that consideration for one's own self-esteem and "face" was the major psychological reason for Chinese being modest. But she did not refer to Erving Goffman's self-presentational motivation. And the study on modesty from the perspective of impression management is scarce. Taking this situation into account, the present study makes an attempt to conduct research on the reasons for Chinese being modest from the perspective of impression management.Leary and Kowalski (1990) proposed a two-component impression management model which provides a general theoretical framework for the present study. It consists of two processes, one of them is impression motivation and the other is impression construction. Our study uses the two components to analyze the reasons of modesty: impression motivation studies what kinds of motivations drive people to be modest; and impression construction is mainly about what kinds of ways people use to convey their modesty.By making an analysis of the data collected from daily communication, newspapers, magazines, Chinese masterpiece and TV programs, we come to the conclusion that modesty in Chinese context is actually governed by the impression motivation. The impression motives in our study contain:(1) seeking approval, assistance and help, respect or liking, solidarity; or comforting others; or avoiding being criticized, which are social outcomes used to obtain the desired results and avoid unsatisfactory results. (2) Self-esteem maintenance and/or face-saving. Motivated by these impression motivations, people try to use various kinds of strategies to create modest impression.From the present study, we can learn the unique part of modesty and know more reasons for being modest and more functions of modesty in Chinese context. That is, besides the cultural reasons, there are self-presentational motives, and the Chinese modesty can also fulfill other functions, such as self-esteem maintenance or face-saving in addition to creating desired images.