We turn now to another vital part in the puzzle of Chinese inscrutability. In chapter 2, I began to explain some serious contradictions and unmet expectations in the discourse strategies of Chinese and Americans. We saw in chapter 3 that one source of their misunderstandings stems from typological differences in the ways that they link, highlight, and signal ideas. Another source grows out of some deep-seated cultural differences in generating meaning and eliciting response. Chinese rhetoric emphasizes an aesthetic and evocative open-endedness. The Chinese aesthetic sees communication as inherently negotiable and collaborative; the communicant's responsibility for fleshing out meaning is just as essential as the communicator's role in evoking meaning. This aesthetic draws a good part of its sense and rhetorical force from the exigencies of a participatory ritual order and from a keen awareness of the imbalance of power and status in a hierarchical world.

To go further into the underlying forces influencing Chinese rhetoric requires that we examine stylistic ideals that Westerners might see as circular starts, tangential views, and subdued stances – what might otherwise be described as non-beginnings, multiple views, and non-endings. We use Westerners' accounts of the Chinese “eight-legged essay,” along with a brief description about its features, to begin our discussion of the social and cosmic resonances of these ideals and of an evocative and participatory thrust in Chinese rhetoric.

The topic is so broad that our discussion will have to be highly selective and limited to points of relevance for this chapter.