A Study On Overseas American Students’ Culture Shock Towards Chinese Privacy

Globalization in the modern world fuels cultural exchanges amongdifferent countries. Against this background, features of different culturemay collide when they get together. Consequently, they may becomebarriers and have adverse effect on intercultural communication. Amongvarious factors of culture, privacy may be a significant one, and it playsan important role in intercultural communication. There are differencesbetween the East and West in terms of its definition and practice. Theformer one, like China, pays less attention to privacy under collectivism.They are caring about affairs of their group and their members’ in thegroup, because they care for others so much in order to show intimacy.The attitude of the Westerners toward privacy is absolutely the opposite.So this difference between the two will be an obstacle in interculturalcommunication. However, many studies only interpret privacy byadopting the science of jurisprudence, while few by culture.This study, based on theories and achievements of privacy both inthe west and our country, is a research about differences of privacy between China and America in the perspective of interculturalcommunication. In this research, the author adopts both quantitative andqualitative method. With these two methods we study overseas Americanstudents’ cultural shock toward Chinese privacy in three settings, whichinclude daily communication setting, clinic setting and personal spacesetting on a realistic, systematical, logical, and convincing basis. And alsothe SPSS software analyzing data of questionnaire will be adopted. Then,the author discusses the performance in these three different settings andthe underlying causes by applying cultural dimensions on cultural values.A better understanding of the differences between Chinese and Americanprivacy and the reasons why the differences occur will be the research’scontribution, which will be conducive to people’s effective interculturalcommunication and help them to cope with their culture shock. And alsothis research will pave the way for the future research in the domain ofprivacy in cross-cultural setting.