The purpose of this paper is to show that the notion of empathy, in Kuno and Kaburaki’s (1977) sense of the term, should be applied to appropriately account for the blocking effect observed in the Chinese long-distance anaphor ziji. The immediate advantage of the empathy account is that we can unify into the generalization so that the blocking effect is no longer the Chinese-specific idiosyncratic properties, but the very natural phenomena observed even in the other languages, such as Japanese and Korean. Thus, we propose that the blocking effect in Chinese ziji is not observed in logophoric environment, but exists instead in empathy environment. This analysis unifies the blocking effect observed not only in Chinese but also in Japanese and Korean, and more clearly accounts for why there is a blocking effect.