ABSTRACT

Rhetoric has long been a discrete discipline in the Western tradition, but this was not the case in Classical China, where a variety of different terms all touching on some aspect of ‘rhetoric’ were used and rhetoric was not considered a separate discipline. This is one reason why it is difficult to be accurate about the origins of Chinese rhetoric. Different terms described different aspects of rhetoric. These included: yan (言), speech and the use of language; ci (辞), modes of speech, types of discourse, eloquence, style; and jian (谏), giving advice, persuasion (Lu 1998: 5). The current Chinese term for rhetoric is xiuci (修辞), which literally means something like ‘refining words’. Its first recorded use is in the Confucian Classic, The Book of Changes.