Chinese Perception Of The Self And Its Impact On Conflict Management In Communication Strategies

Conflict is a permanent and inevitable social phenomenon in people's life, resulted from the violation of individual's or group's need and the mistranslation of language or behavior. This paper is to explore the impact of self on conflict management, including conflict management styles and conflict talk, especially in Chinese culture. Three aspects of self (collective self, private self, and public self) are sampled in different cultural backgrounds, which leads to some preferred conflict management styles. Generally speaking, in collectivistic culture, the collective self is chosen as priority and indirect ways of handling conflict, such as compromising or avoiding are favored. On the contrary, in individualistic culture, the private self is sampled with an emphasis, thus, a direct and confrontational way of handling conflict is preferred. Since the paper has a special focus on Chinese conflict management, experiment is carried out to study the possibility, frequency and related impact of using one's sense of collective self in traditional conflict management styles. Particular attention will also be given to three most preferred conflict management styles in China, including compromising, third party and avoiding together with the deeply-rooted cultural reasons. In addition, the conflict talk in Chinese society resulted from the conflict management styles will be briefly analyzed.