Face in Chinese is semantically and pragmatically distinct from its match in English. Semantically, it is encoded by the two terms of mianzi and lian, and pragmatically, it is proposed as either mianzi or lian with diverse meanings relying on the situation in which it is involved. In Chinese, there are a great variety of explicit expressions of mianzi and lian, for example, “have mianzi/lian”, “lose mianzi/lian”, “don’t want mianzi/lian”, or “give mianzi/lian”, which are oft employed in social interaction, just to cite a few. Apart from mianzi and lian as the primary terms, there are a good many secondary terms employed for face in Chinese, like guangcai, zhengqi, diuren and the like, which can be equals of mianzi or lian in specific situations. This paper proposes how Chinese concepts of mianzi and lian have been conceptualized in historical literature and how these two concepts differ from or relate to the findings in the mainly English-based literature on face and politeness. And finally, it centers on how they look like and differ from each other by taking the view of self-other interaction.