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Chapter 2 Contrastive rhetoric and studies of Chinese and English writing 2.1. Introduction It has been argued that the study of text styles such as linearity and circularity in contrastive rhetoric may not be sufficient for understanding overall differences between English and Chinese writing (see e.g. Scollon, 1997b). With the aim of locating the present study in previous research on contrastive rhetoric and highlighting the gaps that the study attempts to fulfil, this chapter focuses on the following three aspects. First, it reviews contrastive rhetoric as a field of study including its history and contemporary developments. It discusses previous contrastive rhetoric studies in four different areas, namely, contrastive text linguistic studies, studies of writing as cultural and educational activities, classroom-based contrastive studies, and contrastive rhetorical genre studies. Then, the literature review outlines previous contrastive studies on Chinese and English writing. Finally, previous contrastive studies on media discourse are described with reference to the present study. 2.2. Contrastive rhetoric as a field of study In 1966, Kaplan published his famous article ‘Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education’, which marked the birth of the notion now known as contrastive rhetoric. In this article, he reinforced the Whorfian Hypothesis in its weak form which asserts that one’s native language influences one’s thoughts. He, further, assumed that different languages had their own specific and culturally bound c