Study On The Cultural Connotations Of The Chinese Dream

In recent years, studies of the Chinese dream become very popular in academic circle. The Chinese Dream is the latest development stage of the Chinese dream culture and an important part of the world dream culture. Dream culture has experienced several thousand years of development and people began to record, explain and study dreams in ancient times from the fields of philosophy, religion, politics, literature, psychology, medicine and so on. The Chinese and western dream cultures formed a common cultural foundation and became universal concepts which were stored in our brain as knowledge units. We call them the "source domain". The Chinese Dream is a new abstract concept which can be understood with the aid of the universal cultural concept(the "source domain") and we call it the "target domain". According to the Invariance Principle proposed by Lakoff (1990,1993) and developed by Turner (1990,1993) and Mendoza(1998), the mapping from the source domain to the target domain is partial mapping, and some connotations are inherited while the rest are filtered. What connotations the Chinese Dream inherits and filters from the source domain is the emphasis of this thesis. According to the Invariance Principle, this thesis finds out that in Chinese cultural context, the Chinese Dream inherits the positive part and filters the negative part from traditional Chinese dream culture; in international cultural context, there are many coincidences between the Chinese Dream and American Dream (the representative of the western dream culture),but the Chinese Dream filters the western values and other negative images. Through comparative study, this thesis reveals the relationships between the Chinese Dream and the Chinese and western dream cultures and summarizes the cultural connotations of the Chinese Dream.The Chinese Dream inherits the positive aspects of Chinese traditional dream culture and has combinations with the western dream culture which is represented by American Dream, therefore it has a unique research value. This thesis tries to use a new way to study the Chinese Dream in Chinese and international cultural contexts. From the literature review, we find that the studies of the Chinese Dream are restricted to historical, political, social and economic, spiritual value field and translation field while seldom of them is from the cultural filed guided by Mapping Theory. This thesis first uses the Invariance Principle (Lakoff 1990,1993) to study the relationships between the Chinese Dream and the Chinese and western dream cultures and reveals the connotations in Chinese and western cultural contexts, which sublates the traditional normal form and provides new ideas for interdisciplinary comprehensive research.