ABSTRACT
Against this background, this chapter is written with the aim of contributing to the understanding of Chinese-Zambian cross-cultural (mis)communication from the perspective of one side of the ‘game’: the Chinese side. To complete this line of theoretical argument, in this chapter, the author want to consolidate these three dimensions of emotion, to explain how my ethnography can offer an alternative view on the issue of the social significance that emotion plays in Chinese society and to point out how the Chinese cases can contribute to anthropological studies of emotion in general. Writing in the late 1980s, Potter’s analysis is a reflection of the historical contexts of China then. Considering the data from my field sites, especially the post-1980s Chinese migrants, it seems that there is an increasing inclination to individualism. The significance of ‘emotion’ in China is that it directly ties people together and indirectly assigns meanings to the social for the people to recognize and to reproduce.
