Unsolicited advice in mediatised Chinese New Year celebrations: An interaction ritual approach

Wenrui Shi, Dániel Z. Kádár, Juliane House and Fengguang Liu
Dalian University of Foreign Languages | ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics | University of Maribor | University of Hamburg | Hellenic American University

This study investigates advice-giving during Chinese New Year family celebrations when older relatives tend to provide unsolicited advice for younger family members. First, we consider New Year advice featured in social media recordings through the lens of interaction ritual, using a corpus of TikTok videos. Second, we investigate how older and younger evaluators assess behaviours in such mediatised events. We found that the behaviour of older family members has typical ritual features: it is conventionalised in a frame, it unfolds according to conventionalised topics, it triggers self-display and it  enhances rapport between older participants. This analysis has also shown that young participants never explicitly accept the advice of their elders. The results of the second step showed that all evaluators assessed the behaviour of older participants as acceptable. However, when it comes to the behaviour of younger participants, older evaluators mostly found it unacceptable, whereas young evaluators endorsed it.

Publication history

Date received: 30 June 2025

Date accepted: 5 November 2025

Published online: 19 February 2026

Table of contents

This study investigates how older relatives conventionally provide unsolicited advice for younger family members during Chinese New Year family celebrations. Such unsolicited advice has often been described as face-threatening in online discussions by members of the younger generation in China. Recently, such discussions have gone viral, as many younger Chinese challenged unsolicited family advising, sharing negative memes, images and self-recorded videos. In particular, on Douyin (TikTok) unsolicited advising became a record-trending topic. For instance, during the 2024 New Year celebrations, the trending themes in TikTok’s Huàtí 话题 (‘Topics’) section were all centred on this issue, as Table 1 shows:

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