Collectivism Vs. Individualism Difference Within Chinese Culture

Since Hofstede's (1980) original study on cross-cultural field, numerous researchers have focused on studying individualism and collectivism. Most scholars follow Hofstede's way to consider individualism and collectivism as two opposite poles of one culture dimension, however, when Triandis (1990) measured these tendencies empirically, individualism and collectivism emerged as uncorrelated tendencies. He emphasized on the diversities within culture, i.e., people of the same culture background can be high on both, low on both, or high on one and low on the other.China has, according to the conclusion of Hofstede, been ranked among the collectivistic countries. Triandis'framework has been applied in this thesis to study Chinese people's cultural tendency from another point of view. The self-report questionnaire, which is designed and testified by Triandis et al., has been distributed to 176 non-English majoring postgraduates of Chongqing University, which have been considered as the representatives of Chinese culture, to test whether or not these conclusions accord with Hofstede's theory, i.e., the majority of Chinese belongs to collectivist, and how people differ in individualism and collectivism tendencies. The research reveals that: (1) the majority of these subjects is manifesting as collectivists, which is according to Hofstede's theory that Chinese culture belongs to collective culture, while there are subjects who have a strong tendency toward individualism; (2) significant portion of subjects that manifest both individualistic and collectivistic or neither individualistic nor collectivistic do exist in the female subjects, the male subjects, the younger subjects without work experience, and the older subjects with work experience; (3) the female are more collectivistic than the male, while the younger subjects are more individualistic than the older subjects.Though this thesis has several limitations especially in the aspect of subjects, as an exploratory study, the results, in a sense, still prove the whole system of Triandis'individualism/collectivism theory.