A Study On The Role Of Cities In Sino - American Cultural Exchange

As a sub-national actor, cities take an active part in Sino-U.S. humanitarian andcultural exchange in four ways, namely China-U.S. High-level Consultation onPeople-to-people Exchange Mechanism, Friendly Cities, China-U.S. GovernorsForum and China-U.S. Mayors Summit. There are three apparent problems in theoperation of the mechanisms. Firstly, the exchange content is not rich. Secondly, theexchange actors are unequal. Finally, coordination among the multi-level mechanismsis not enough. It is found that the problems are caused by the differences in exchangecapability based on mechanism theory, which mainly manifested in national and localcontext background. The cooperation of Chinese and the U.S. cities in humanitarianand cultural fields is featured by vulnerability, sensitivity and imbalance due to thecomplexity, interaction of governmental and non-governmental actors, multi-level ofthe mechanism itself as well as the different context background and exchangecapability.