Differences In Time Perspective And Time Use Between China And France

This thesis is based on the reports submitted by the Chinese students and French students from the program of Sino-French master cooperative education in IAE Nantes University,aiming to solve the problems occurred in the cooperation caused by the differences in time perspective.Even though the cross-cultural communication has happened from long time ago,it has become an important object of study until the middle of 20 th century.After World War II,the American anthropologists has been paying attention to the cross-cultural communication,among all the researchers,Edward.T.Hall has made the greatest contribution to the cross-cultural communication.His golden work <silent language> indicated the official birth of cross-cultural communication study.In that book,Hall considered the culture as communication,and communication can be divided into two parts: verbal communication and non-verbal communication.Different from the verbal communication,which has a set of system including sentences?words and grammar,the non-verbal communication is very vague and hard to define,but it is everywhere and has penetrated into all aspects of life,so it is even more important than verbal communication sometimes.The time perspective is a concept that people learned in the social practice,belongs to the deep structure of culture,and has a direct influence on the non-verbal communication.In the cross-cultural communication,there are lots of problems and conflicts caused by the differences in time perspective,the people who has different cultural background can't aware how deep the time perspective has influenced him,he can't find the reason when there comes problems and troubles in the communication,that's how cultural conflicts occurred.As two countries with a long history that at both ends of the Eurasia,the cross-cultural communication between China and France has happened a long time ago,like French missionaries came to China in 13 th century,educational cooperation between France and China in modern age etc.After 20 th century,as the economy and political relationship between the two countries was getting more and more closer,theeducational and cultural communication was getting more and more frequent too.This thesis is intended to find the reason of the conflicts occurred in Sino-French time perspective by building a theoretical framework and content analysis.Through comparing the behavior patterns of different cultures,and studying the deep hierarchical structure of culture,we can promote the deep-seated cooperation between the education of China and France,and the cross-cultural communication between Europe and Asia.