Face Culture In China And America And Its Influence Upon Intercultural Social Communications

With the acceleration of economic globalization, intercultural communication becomes more and more frequent. Due to different cultural conventions, people in different areas will encounter cultural conflicts in intercultural communication. Hu Wenzhong (1999) summarized three major obstacles in intercultural communication:cognitive error, stereotype and ethnocentrism.As an important part of culture, face has a great influence on people’s social communication. Since people from different cultural backgrounds have different understanding of face, they will encounter many obstacles in social communication; hence, it’s urgent to deal with face problems in intercultural social communication. Although many domestic and foreign scholars in different fields have made a lot of researches on this issue and published many related articles, few researches have been conducted on face problems of intercultural social communication.This thesis makes an overall review of the theories about culture by Hofstede, Samovar etc; and the theories about face by Goffman, Brown&Levinson, Scollon&Scollon, and Ting-Toomey etc. On the basis of these researches, the author makes an in-depth study on face culture in China and America and its influence on intercultural communication. Meanwhile, the author puts forward some new ideas, which will not only enlarge the application of face theory in intercultural communication, but also enrich the connotation of cross-culture.Based on the movie The Wedding Banquet, the author makes a comparative analysis of the behaviors of Chinese and Americans in the process of social communication in order to find how the concept of face influences the social communicative behavior. The author finds that Chinese excessively pay more attention to their faces in the process of social communication and do something violating the trend of thrift, which can’t be completely understood by Americans. To some extent, it is a waste of resources. In the end, on the basis of the research results, the author gives some reasonable suggestions to people who are from different cultural backgrounds with the purpose of facilitating a smooth intercultural communication. What’s more, the author gives suggestions to people who often maintain and enhance their face in social communication and do something violating the trend of thrift so as to avoid the waste of resources and promote a harmonious interpersonal relationship.