My Chinese friends say they notice that Westerners use lots of pleases (qi?ng) and thank yous (xiexie) when speaking Chinese. And actually, they say, we use way too many of them for Chinese taste. A Chinese linguist, Kaidi Zhan, says that using a please, as in “Please pass the salt,” actually has the opposite effect of politeness here in China. The Chinese way of being polite to each other with words is to shorten the social distance between you. And saying please serves to insert a kind of buffer or space that says, in effect, that we need some formality between us here.
Westerners use too many 'please' and 'thank you''s for Chinese taste. Share on X
Source: Here’s how ‘Thank you’ sounds to Chinese ears – Business Insider