Bowing avoid bumping heads. The kowtow is the highest sign of reverence in Han Chinese culture, but its use has become extremely rare since the collapse of Imperial China. In many situations, the standing bow has replaced the kowtow. However, in modern Chinese societies, bowing is not as formalized as in Japan, South Korea and North Korea. Bowing is normally reserved for occasions such as marriage ceremonies and as a gesture of respect for the deceased, although it still sometimes used for more formal greetings. In China, three bows are customarily executed at funerals including state funerals, ancestral worship, and at
Chinese number gestures representing bowing. When playing "drinking finger games" (划拳, 猜拳), slightly different sets of finger gestures of numbers is used. One of them is: The gesture of the digit 0 is used for showing numbers like 20, 30, 40, etc, where the left hand shows the tens digit and the right hand shows the digit 0. Chinese number gestures Chinese number gestures are a method to signify the natural numbers one through ten using one hand. This method may have been developed to bridge the many varieties of Chinese—for example, the numbers 4 () and 10 () are hard to distinguish