Differences In Cultural Values Between China And The West And Their Effects On Gift-giving Behaviors

The 21st century is an era of global economic integration which is often associated with cultural diversification. The phenomenon that economic integration and cultural diversification co-exist brings forward new challenges for people who engage in intercultural communication: both sides of communication tend to feel a strong cultural conflict and differences, such as verbal behavior, nonverbal behaviour. However, either communication model or behavior norms are restricted and tied by value, at the same time, they reflect the essence of value. Therefore, research on any cultural phenomenon may inevitably be started by studying the corresponding cultural values.Gift giving is a common courtesy observed in many cultures. However, because of cultural differences, the gift-giving customs in different cultures vary from country to country . Gift giving can be problematic when you don't understand the culture and customs of the intended recipient's homeland. A lot of studies at home and abroad have been made in recent years towards gift giving. Such researches are found in, but are undoubtedly not limited to, the fields of anthropology, economics, history, popular culture, psychology, sociology, social work and women's studies. Moreover, scholars within these disciplines have produced several books pertaining to gift exchange. They have found, and continue to find that gift giving is a fascinating and compelling topic of study and strive to push its exploration into even more exciting directions. This dissertation, from the perspective of cross-cultural communication, makes a contrastive analysis of Chinese and western cultural values, attempts to study the impact of cultural value on gift giving behaviours. The paper based on Hofstede's cultural dimension—individualism and collectivism, aims to illustrate how gift-giving behaviour works and differs across cultural values; specifically, in the Confucian collectivistic nature of China, and the individualistic nature of the West.In the Chinese culture, an individual is inherently connected to others and fosters relationships through reciprocity, sentiment, and kinship network. Chinese philosophical thought is largely influenced by Confucianism and emphasizes that people should align their behaviour with their social roles to maintain harmony in interpersonal relationships. Gift giving and other reciprocal exchanges play a leading role in social life, especially in maintaining, reproducing, and modifying interpersonal relations. A number of Chinese scholars have recently made efforts to establish an analytic framework based on indigenous Chinese categories, drawing on guanxi (personal net works), renqing (moral norms and human feelings), mianzi (face), and bao (reciprocity). This explicitly defined Chinese perspective, which emphasizes the importance of interpersonal relations, should provide insights for a comparative study of gift giving and social exchange.In contrast to that, western value concepts are quite different from those of Chinese. Ren and Li find no place in the western philosophy and religion. What is highly valued in the West is individualism. Ties between individuals are therefore much looser, the level of loyalty is lower and the conformity with the group is less important in the western countries than in collectivistic cultures such as China. These diversified values thus lead to the differences in gift giving between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. The most distinguishing difference is that purchasing in western society is becoming more and more self-centred and that in this context self-giving has become more widespread. In self-gifting, consumers give to themselves. In such cultures, the purpose of gift giving is to reinforce an individual-based self-concept. In addition, two major shifts in western background have happened concerning the gift giving that will be discussed in my study: 1.The rapid commercialization of holidays. 2. The social networks have shifted from being primarily dominated by kin to being primarily made up of friends.This dissertation employs a comparative method which is an effective way in achieving successful intercultural communication. After a thorough analysis, this paper comes to a conclusion that different cultural values have great influence on the gift giving behaviours either from the traditional value or modern shift.