The Study Of Cultural Differences Between Chinese And American Fund-raising Letters

Fund-raising letter is a letter proposed and initiated by an individual or the collective in the hope of completing a task or carrying out some public benefit activities. Culture exerts a profound influence on the writing of fund-raising letters, especially on its wording and phrasing as well as overall arrangement. Thus, the fund-raising letters have a strong cultural flavor and value orientation.The current study of fund-raising letters in China has been in the initial stage. The limited studies on fund-raising letters have been conducted from the perspective of genre analysis and linguistic perspective while few comparative cultural studies between Chinese and American fund-raising letters have been carried out. The thesis is an empirical study of cultural differences between Chinese and American fund-raising letters based on authentic language materials.One hundred fund-raising letters including fifty Chinese ones and fifty American ones have been collected for the study. All of the Chinese and American fund-raising letters were selected randomly from the main pages of fund-raising organizations and personal sources on internet. They were written by the natives in recent ten years ranging from education, health and human services, environmental preservation, natural disaster to personal activities. All of them are complete and unmodified. Therefore, the data can represent the contemporary Chinese and American fund-raising letters respectively to some extent.The theory of cross-culture communication will be adopted to analyze the cultural differences between the Chinese and American fund-raising letters. According to the study, distinctive cultural differences are found in values, high/low-context culture, religion, time orientation and thought pattern. The Chinese fund-raising letters show the culture representations of collectivism, high uncertainty avoidance and high-context culture; the American fund-raising letters demonstrate the culture representations of individualism, low uncertainty avoidance and low-context culture. The Chinese fund-raising letters are greatly influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism while the American fund-raising letters by Christianity and the Bible. The Chinese tend to employ past time, polychronic time and circular time orientation; by contrast, the Americans prefer future time, monochronic time, and liner time orientation. The Chinese thought patterns are usually figurative, inductive and politically ethical while the Americans always think in flat, deductive and scientifically cognitive way. All the cultural differences mentioned above are prominent in the Chinese and American fund-raising letters.Huge cultural differences exist between Chinese and American fund-raising letters. The identification of these cultural differences can not only help enhance the understanding on Chinese and American fund-raising letters, but also improve the sensitivity of cultural differences and writing skills. It enables us to use different diction, sentence patterns and overall arrangements according to different Chinese and American cultures while writing a Sino-American fund-raising letter in order to fully arouse the readers'sympathy and ultimately to maximize the social effect of Sino-American fund-raising.