The purpose of this research is to investigate how the speech act of refusing is realized in Brazilian Portuguese and in Mandarin of Mainland China from the perspectives of the concept of interculturalism, linguistic sociology and some Confucian thoughts. In general, refusals present discourtesy and lack of interest on the part of the speaker; this speech act can even cause misunderstandings between people, especially when they come from different culture origins. Nevertheless, several factors and strategies can be identified in refusal speech act in both Portuguese and Mandarin, besides some similarities and differences, which can be verified in those strategies. The corpus used in this study is formed of analysis of scenes collected from two television programs: The Big Family/A Grande Família (2001-2011, Rio de Janeiro/Brazil) and Tiger Mother Cat Father(2015, Beijing/China). By observing these data, we present the main strategies of refusing identified in the two languages, as well as the intercultural factors which interfere in the selection of these strategies.