This pragmatic approach to the interpretations of Mandarin bare nouns, discusses how they can have a generic or existential interpretation and a definite reference. There have been proposals to explain the interpretations of Mandarin bare nouns in terms of syntactic structure and predicate types. The paper demonstrates that Mandarin bare nouns get a generic interpretation with individual-level predicates. With stage-level predicates, they get a definite or an existential interpretation, depending on whether they are in topic position or not. It also shows that the Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel et al., 1993) restricts potential interpretations of Chinese bare nouns and that Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) is required to explain people's choice of the intended interpretation from the possible ones.