A Cultural Equilibrium Framework Between Chinese And Western Culture In China's English Medium

As China is playing an important role in international affairs, the research on cross-cultural media communication is more and more emphasized. This thesis aims to challenge the cultural imbalance in current research traditions, and argues for a cultural perspective in facilitating better intercultural exchange amidst accelerated processes of globalization. It concerns the following questions:Does the intercultural media communication conform to the different cultural characteristics in their language and arguments? How can we make creative use of methods that are appropriate to the issues, objectives, and cultural and historical context at hand? How can we ensure equality of intercultural media communication with the west?The thesis carries out an examination of media discourses on the 29th Olympic Games opening and closing ceremonies in three international newspapers in the year of 2008. It selects data from The Times, The New York Times and China Daily as, these three newspapers come from the U.K. the U.S.A and China respectively and can be seen as authoritative newspapers in these countries. China Daily can be seen as the representative of China's English medium. This thesis makes a comparative analysis between China Daily and the other two western newspapers. The news reported on August 9th and August 25th in 2008 is collected. Because the opening and closing ceremonies are performed in the evening of August 8th and August 24th respectively, most of the news reporting about them appears the next day.After review of different approaches to media communication, this thesis proposes to take a holistic and multicultural perspective and argue for an equilibrium notion of contemporary Chinese media communication with the West:Within the international communication system, it is necessary to focus on improving the cultural tolerance of both sides, introducing Chinese culture effectively through media communication and making China's voice louder in the world. Proceeding from this equilibrium theory, this thesis proposes a corresponding integrated model:. Chinese taiji model. The second-level agenda setting theory and Attitude System in Appraisal theory are adopted in the analysis.At last, three major findings are presented, based on the forgoing analysis. Firstly, Western "critical" characteristics differ from Chinese "supportive" characteristics because of different cultural backgrounds, harmonious vs confrontational. Secondly, there is pushing-pulling force during the intercultural communication. The western media needs to be a little more "supportive" while Chinese media needs to be a little more "critical". Thirdly, by integrating Chinese Netizens'influence with Western feedback-feedforward control system, setting China's own agenda with Western accepted discourse styles, Chinese literary cultural principals with Western rhetoric, we can make creative use of methods that are appropriate to the issues, objectives, and cultural and historical context at hand.