An Analysis On Sino-american Cultural Conficts From Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory Perspective

Jade Snow Wong is an epoch-making writer in the history of Chinese American literature.As a representative work of her early novels,Fifth Chinese Daughter has achieved pioneering and creative success in the United States after the first publication.It has become an important text in our study of Chinese American literature,society and history nowadays.Domestic and foreign researches on Fifth Chinese Daughter mainly focus on the interpretation of minority characters portrayed in this novel from different literary criticism angles,for example,the perspective of post-colonialism and feminism.Most of the researches on this novel from the perspective of cross-culture are aimed at the construction of the cultural identity of the characters in novel.Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory proposed by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede is a framework for measuring cultural differences in different countries.This theory has become a classical one in the field of cross-cultural research and attracted wide attention from the academic circles since its birth.This dissertation will analyze the Sino-American cultural conflicts embodied in Fifth Chinese Daughter from the perspective of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory.It will explore the root source of the intense cultural conflicts between China and the United States from these five cultural dimensions: power distance,collectivism vs individualism,masculine vs feminine,uncertainty avoidance,long-term orientation vs short-term orientation.This dissertation wholly falls into five chapters.Chapter one firstly has a brief introduction to the novel Fifth Chinese Daughter and its author Jade Snow Wong.Then it systematically introduces the research background,the purpose of the study,methodology,and the organization of the dissertation.Chapter two mainly introduces the research status of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory,Sino-American cultural conflicts and Fifth Chinese Daughter in China and abroad.Chapter three is the theoretical basis.First,the background of the development of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is analyzed.Then it provides a bit more detail on these five cultural dimensions: power distance,collectivism vs individualism,masculine vs feminine,uncertainty avoidance,long-term orientation vs short-term orientation.Chapter four analyzes the Sino-American cultural conflicts embodied in five cultural dimensions with the specific cultural phenomena data described in Fifth Chinese Daughter.Chapter five is a conclusion of the first four chapters which explains the major findings and limitations in the research.The main research results of this dissertation are as follows: Firstly,all of the origins of Sino-American cultural conflicts caused by the differences of Chinese and American cultural values in different cultural dimensions are not accidental.Therefore,it's feasible and meaningful to apply the Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory into the analysis of the cultural conflicts in Chinese American literature.Secondly,the Sino-American cultural conflicts are more prominent in the dimensions of power distance,collectivism vs individualism and long-term orientation vs short-term orientation but only existed on some special cultural aspects in other two dimensions.Thirdly,with the development of the plural society,the Sino-American cultural conflicts have the tendency to be harmonized from contradiction and the characters of the novel will abandon cultural centralism after the intense collision of cross-cultural conflicts.