This study was designed to explore the issue of request strategies in Chinese settings by establishing corpora of video clips of contemporary Chinese teledramas. The present study chose short sequences of video clips from the Chinese teledramas and designed nine situations to establish corpora by taking the two social variables of power and distance as reference points. The study shows that the most used request strategies are the mood derivable, the query preparatory and the hedged performatives. Chinese people have a tendency towards more naturalness and straightforwardness in real life and employ request strategies based more on social distance than social power.
