Closing medical encounters in China’s Mainland: Doctors’ fishing for patient-initiated terminal exchanges

Drawing on conversation analysis, this paper explores how medical encounters are closed in China’s mainland. Based on a collection of 75 naturally occurring cases, we observe two dominant conversational practices oriented to closing Chinese medical encounters: a stand-alone ‘okay?’ as a generic preclosing initiation, and a gratitude-expressing action as the initiation of the closing sequence. Through a further examination of salient closing patterns in our data, we propose that Chinese doctors prefer fishing for patients’ initiation of the terminal exchange to closing the medical interaction by themselves. The ways of and reasons for eliciting a patient-initiated closure are also discussed. This study may provide a frame of reference for studying medical closures in other cultures and have implications for cross-cultural comparison.