This article discusses and compares how Chinese and English postgraduate students manage a harmonious relationship with university instructors by managing rapport and doing relational work in their academic request emails. The rapport-management strategies were explored and then further evaluated in relation to the taxonomies of relational work within the discourse, illocutionary and stylistic domains. It found that Chinese and British students belong to distinct discourse communities shaped by different and similar discursive practices and norms, which are conditioned not only by different national cultures, but also by a similar community culture. The findings should be able to (1) develop the existing research alike and show how the email behaviour reflects the intricate and dynamic factors of rapport management; (2) support integrating the theories of rapport management and relational work into methodologically sound cross-cultural/intercultural pragmatic studies; (3) enable email writers to maintain or enhance harmonious relationships with recipients so as to obtain request compliance smoothly and to uphold their membership within the discourse community and (4) help readers to learn the pragmatic aspects of native and foreign languages in workplaces.