Analysis Of Chinese-American Cultural Differences From The Perspective Of Value Orientation

Today's world is marked by frequently interactions resulting in communications between people of different cultural backgrounds. This cross-cultural communication covers many fields from business, politics, tourism, education, culture, media and entertainment etc. Facing up to the trend of globalization in the whole world, it calls for the necessity of cross-cultural communication. As different cultures breed the special personalities and way of living of a certain country, a deep understanding of cultural difference and mastering some skills in cross-cultural communication is necessary facing up to the new trend.Cross-Cultural communication is a relative new discipline emerges as time requires. Although it originates from the United States of America, due to its influential practical significance, this field attracts attention of scholars all over the world. Hofstede's cultural value dimension theory may be the most influential and acceptable authoritative theory in this field. In1970s, he made an investigation on110,000respondents who are all managers from IBM's subsidiaries distributed in more than40countries and regions. Through a mass of data analysis, he concluded four typical value dimensions from people of different cultures backgrounds, namely, collectivism-individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity-femininity. His conclusion from the study laid a foundation for the later studies in issues of cross-cultural communication.With the stepped-up process of economic globalization as the background, and the rapid economic development on her own, China has more and more opportunities to contact with the rest of the world, among which, cooperation with the United States of America is extreme close. In order to improve the efficiency of communications between the two countries who are of totally different cultures, this thesis chooses two typical cultures—chinese and American cultures as the entry point and try to analyze the differences under the guidance of Hofstede's cultural value dimension theory. In this thesis, the first four dimensions of Hofstede's theory are adopted as the theoretical basic of analysis on Chinese-American cultural values. The intention of this thesis is to find out the barriers in the process of cross-cultural communication between people from Chinese and American cultures in cross-cultural context. And the thesis also aims to find out the deeper reasons contributed to cross-cultural barriers under the guidance of some authoritative cross-cultural communication theory. In this thesis, interpretive approach is mainly adopted to illustrate the differences between Chinese and American cultures. As culture is shaped historically and socially, the explanation of cultural values can not succeed without interpretation of historical origins. In order to make interpretation more vivid, some case studies are explained in the thesis to display the value differences between Chinese and Americans. Meanwhile, based on the previous study on this topic, plenty of data were collected and ready for the later analysis and investigation.From this study, three conclusions would be drawn. Firstly, due to different cultural backgrounds, Chinese and American cultural values appear to be different in value dimensions, such as, collectivism-individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity-femininity. And these differences may lead to potential barriers in cross-cultural communication. Secondly, differences on value dimensions of Chinese and American culture result from different historical, philosophical backgrounds. Thirdly, although the differences exist and can't be avoided, it could be overcome by developing one's cross-cultural competence. In addition, although some meaningful thinking and explanation are made to compare the cultural value difference between Americans and Chinese culture, it is pity that there are still some limitations, such as lack of experimental investigation. It is hoped that this regret could be made up in the future study.