Exploratory Study On China’s Northern-southern Intercultural Friendship Development Among University Students

Frequent contact between people from the North and South in China brings about theissue of North-South interaction to the stage, especially between university students with theincrease of enrollment rate. Differences between the North and South do make a difference inthe development of northern-southern university students‘intercultural friendshipdevelopment.In this thesis, the term intercultural specifically refers to the culture of South and NorthChina, namely, regional culture differences. To explore the status of intercultural friendshipdevelopment between northern and southern university students, as well as the influentialfactors, the author conducted a mixed method research. Based on the quantitative analysisamong186university students from major Chinese Northern and Southern cities as well as5in-depth follow-up interviews, the author found that compared with intracultural friendshipintimacy within southern and northern university students, the intimacy level of interculturalfriendship between the two sides are relatively low. This tendency is especially significant fornortherners in the six dimensions of intimate friendship scale; while for southerners, thoughtheir intercultural friendship intimacy is lower compared with intracultural friendship withintheir culture, the difference is not as significant as that of students from North China.Furthermore, qualitative study shows that factors such as life style, living habits,stereotypes, personality which are the results of regional differences do influence furtherdevelopment of intercultural friendship between the north and the south; other influentialfactors include common activities, personality, etc.This study, with an indigenous base, a dynamic and new perspective in terms ofintercultural communication study, will not only enrich intercultural communication studies inChina, bringing the application of a new scale into studies of Chinese issues, but also providespractical values for further north-south interactions and conflicts.