China Should Preserve Cultural Identity in Cross-Cultural Communication

Abstract: Globalization can benefit human beings, but can also lead to more clashes between different civilizations. Cultural crisis has been aroused in so many countries. So does China. This paper is going to explain what China should do towards cultural identity in cross-cultural communication from three aspects. The first one is that China should be more cautious when face the impact of foreign culture. As for foreign culture, we should take the essence and discard the dregs. The second one is that China should strengthen our cultural identity to make our country stand in the nations of the world. The last one is that we should pay more attention to our own traditional Chinese culture preserve it instantly. There is no time to delay to protect our culture and keep our culture identity. Some phenomena about the impact of the foreign culture in China and the current situation of traditional Chiese culture will be showed to state the fact and the problems.

Key words: globalization; cultural identity; foreign culture; traditional Chinese culture

In the environment of globalization, we should treat the foreign culture cautiously and continue to preserve our cultural identity unswervingly. By doing this, we can stand strong in the global competition. But what is cultural identity? Cultural identity is the identity of a group or a culture or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one’s belonging to a group or a culture. The formation of one nation’s cultural identity needs a long period of time. During this period, people share a same history, religion, values, culture, language, forefather and custom, etc. They regard the most meaningful things, such as culture, as their most important things. That is cultural identity.

As for foreign culture, we should take the essence and discard the dregs. There is an ancient Chinese adage said haste makes waste. When the McDonald’s first entered the Chinese market, it brought fast-food culture. This culture let people just pursue the speed but ignore the connotation. People now eat nonnutritive fast food, read abridged version of the famous work, and participate in the crash course in order to improve themselves in a really short time. All these are bad for people mentally and physically. On the other hand, there is no doubt that McDonald’s represents the business model that China has never developed before. It has been modernizing and democratizing China. McDonald’s has been bringing China its franchise model that combines and compromises centralization with decentralization, and individual property with collective property. It can let its members share the risks and returns from the discovery and exploitation of new business opportunities. These are missing from the China’s old collective enterprises and communes.

The philosophy professor Zhao Xiuyi has said that the intention of western utilitarianism contains two principles-the principle of utility and the principle of justice(陆). The utilitarianism has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, we should give a play to its incentive mechanism which advocates interest-driven. On the other hand, we should restrain the negative effects of its principle of utility which can make students’ values change in a wrong way. The growing market economy is continually deconstructing our traditional value system. But a new value system is unformed yet. Facing the trend of western utilitarianism, the public have absorbed so many positive ideas, such as the principle of utility, practicality. Facing the surging tide of marketability, science and technology, information and the globalization, modern people become more and more practical and materializing. They just highlight the principle of utility, but ignore the principle of justice. What people know about utilitarianism gradually incline to the pursuit of material gain. Under such circumstances, the undergraduate students are affected by the utilitarianism inevitably. Their values change adversely.

For example, there is a phenomenon that some college students lust after being a student leader. This used to be good. However, there appears a utilitarian tendency in job hunting of university graduates in face of severe competition. When they find that some enterprises and institutions appreciate the university graduates who were student leaders before, they change their mind. They seem to forget that being a student leader is to toughen ego once, raising a fair show of ego. What they care about now is not improving their ability and quality, but they can get a job more easily by doing this.

The Hundred Days' Reform was a cultural, political and educational reform movement in late Qing Dynasty China. It was undertaken by the young Guangxu Emperor and his supporters. Kang Yuwei and Liang Qichao brought the constitutional monarchy into China at that time. They said to Guangxu that only political reform could prevent the downfall of the nation. So the emperor decided to change the government from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy with democracy. And he inclined to imitate Japan’s Meiji restoration after he read some books about other countries’ coups. The emperor issued a series of imperial edicts and orders. He applied principles of capitalism to strengthen the economy, completely changed the military buildup to strengthen the military and industrialized all of China through manufacturing, commerce, and capitalism, etc. Although the reform movement was failed, the Chinese people got to know the idea that they had never heard before. Although this kind of political system was not implemented completely in the old China, it really brought new thought to the nation. The movement enabled people to think more about freedom and development and spread advanced western culture. The failure of the reform movement gave great impetus to revolutionary forces within China. Changes within the establishment were seen to be largely hopeless, and the overthrow of the whole Qing government increasingly appeared to be the only viable way to save China. Such sentiments directly contributed to the success of the Chinese Revolution in 1911, barely a decade later

Through cross-cultural communication, China should also preserve its own cultural identity. In 2004, the Chinese Government established the first Confucius Institute in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The Confucius Institute is a nonprofit organization. It provides an opportunity for the foreign learners to learn Chinese more conveniently. This institute helps popularize traditional Chinese culture. It extends the idea of Confucius- “harmony is most precious” and “harmonious yet different”. The Confucius Institute let the world know more about China. Considering that Chinese has the largest number of speakers in the world and the longest timespan of literature, many countries across the world have seen an increasingly strong demand for knowledge about the Chinese language and culture. As the pictographic character, Chinese is a very old language, with its earliest writings dating back nearly 4,000 years. The Chinese government should try their best to protect and promote this language. It is an important symbol of Chinese culture.

At the same time, we also need to pay more attention to the traditional Chinese culture. We are facing the traditional culture default. The folk art, legendary, history and traditional virtues are valuable fortune. In recent years, many foreign companies made lots of movies about China’s traditional culture and legendary. They all full of Chinese elements, such as The KongFu Panda of Dreamworks and Mulan of Disney. This kind of phenomenon indicates that the world is going to realize the charm of Chinese culture. Let’s take a look at the current situation about the traditional Chinese culture. There are some researches on students about the traditional culture. The statistics show that almost half of the college students are not interested in Beijing opera or the other local operas and only 25% pupils know the four treasures of the study. The statistics also show that except the Children’s Day, children like celebrating Christmas the most, only 33% children like celebrating the Spring Festival and 14% like the Mid-Autumn Day. As a Chinese, we should do more in developing our traditional culture and custom. That is what we need to do and what we have to do. If we have to protect our culture by people who come from other nations, then our culture must decline sooner or later.

In today’s world, the globalization makes all the countries grow fast. At the same, it also leads to an identity crisis and the clashes of different civilizations. The American political scientist Samuel Huntington has proposed a theory called The Clashes of Civilizations. He argues that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world (Huntington.153). A country must reinforce its own cultural identity in order to strengthen its leadership and international influence. And every country must answer a simple question: “Who are you?” not “Which side are you?” The answer about cultural identity can confirm a nation’s position in global politics, its friends and enemies.

If a country loses its own cultural identity, the most important significance of the nation’s existence will disappear without trace. If a country just accepts all the foreign culture and values, it will damage the country’s political system and its cohesive force. China’s sustained economic growth and development, and increasing role as a global power have enabled our cultural impact to grow significantly in recent years. Through international cultural exchange, China can enrich its own culture and contributes to the development of art and culture around the world.

Works Cited

Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print.

Friedman, Jonathan. Culture Identity and Global Process. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1994. Print.

Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2005. Print.

“On the Crisis of Cultural Identity and the Constructive Meaning of Confucian Ethics in the Age of Globalization” Confucius2000. 2001. Web. 6 May. 2012.

陆玲玲. “西方功利主义对大学生价值观的影响”人民论坛网.Web. 6 May. 2012.

Cultural identity 文化认同 作文