Analyzing An Intercultural Communication Event: The Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony As A Case Study Of Intercultural Dialogue

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a big intercultural communication event. In a time when"global economic integration"and"information global village"is taking shape, more and more international events have emerged. Intercultural communication has become an important part of political, economic and daily life. This essay takes the Opening Ceremony as a case study for intercultural dialogue in big international events.Intercultural Communication is a historical and cultural phenomenon along with human development. Any process of information dissemination between individuals or organizations from different cultural backgrounds can be referred to as cross-cultural communication. However, intercultural communication in big international events(2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 Shanghai Expo for example ) is much different from that between individuals. Intercultural communication in International events is highly targeted and srategic, thus it needs specific communication methods and platforms, to accomplishment of participated goal.To conduct cross-culture communication smoothly, the author believes that the first thing to do is to change the"sender-centered"thinking pattern and emphasize the principal position of the audience. The information sender should carry out"dialogues"with the information receivers, rather than giving the information out simply on a one-way direction.In international communication events, intercultural communication which pays full attention to intercultural"dialogue"should be an Integrated Strategic Communication. Secondly, during the intercultural communication process, the information sender should combine multiple media sources and platforms, such as newspapers, magazines, TV, Internet, radio and so on, to create a more comprehensive and tridimensional"dialogue"environment. In this way, the information being sent out could complement and support each other, thus a better communication result can be achieved. Integrated Strategic Communication is also reflected in its strategic planning and the Two-way Symmetrical Communication Management. According to Bakhtin's"dialogue"theory, the process of textual comprehension is a manifestation of interaction between reader and the text, rather than a process of the culture text influencing the culture audience on a one-way direction basis. The communicator must create the room for "dialogue ", and realize the cultural appeal of different audiences and the cultural variation between different people, otherwise the communicator cannot consciously adjust the strategy and maximize the text comprehension effect.Chapter One is the Introduction which mainly covers the rationale, theoretic basis, research methodology and structure of the paper. Chapter Two is a literature review, mainly introducing well-known scholars and their researches in the field of intercultural communication both at home and abroad, and giving a systematic elaboration on Bakhtin's"Dialogue"theory. The third chapter proposes the author's theoretic framework of Integrated Strategic Communication, combing with Bakhtin's Dialogue theory. The fourth chapter is a case study which takes the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony as an example, analyzing its intercultural communication strategy according to the framework discussed in previous chapter. Chapter Five is the conclusion. It summarizes the findings of the whole paper and points out the contributions and limitations of the research.