Unsolicited advice in mediatised Chinese New Year celebrations

Abstract 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.