A Comparative Study Of Chinese And US Governmental Reports On Sino-US Trade Frictions From An Intercultural Perspective

Official news reports on trade friction that occurred among countries are supposed to be valuable data to explore certain cultural elements then to work out appropriate ways of dealing with the friction.The present study adopts Hofstede's cultural value dimension and Hall's high-context and low-context communication as theoretical foundation,and takes 40 pieces of governmental news reportage concerned with Sino-US trade friction of the year 2013 to 2016 as research objects,with 20 pieces selected from the official website of Ministry of Commerce of People's Republic of China,and the other 20 pieces selected from the official website of Office of the United States Trade Representative.Through linguistic analysis on the selected reports,the author aims to find out the differences in their language use,and then to explore their cultural differences hiding in the linguistic differences,furthermore,to compare the data of this research findings with the traditional cultural value index.The thesis contains six chapters.Chapter one is a brief introduction;chapter two reviews previous studies;chapter three dwells on theoretical framework used in the present research;chapter four covers the research design and methodology;chapter five gives a detailed comparison between Chinese and US official trade friction reports and reflected culture features;and chapter six comes to a conclusion.The research finds that there are distinct linguistic differences between the two countries' reports,which reflects their cultural differences mainly in individualism and collectivism,uncertainty avoidance,power distance,long-term and short-term orientation,and high-context and low-context communication.What is noteworthy is that though,viewed from specific words(like workers,families)use,American holds lower level in power distance,but words of high power in American reports are used more frequently than those of lower power,which is in contrast to the culture value index of US in traditional cultural theory.It is the special case in economic news reports concerned with trade friction.The study not only reveals the linguistic differences of Sino-US governmental report on trade friction and cultural differences between the two countries,but also provides a new perspective of cross-cultural comparative study--to compare the cultural value dimension reflected by the exiting research objects with the index in previous scholars' culture value theories,to see whether they are in accordance,if no,what the differences are.