A Study On The Face Culture In China And The West And Its Intercultural Communication Strategies

With the boosting of Chinese reform and opening-up policy,the intercultural economic and social activities have become more and more frequent.While due to the various cultural differences from different regions,the failure of intercultural communication occurs constantly.Face,a kind of social psychological phenomenon and an important aspect of culture,plays a significant role in people’s social communicative activities.The different understandings,different focus of the face and the different approaches to resolve the face problems often lead to the communication barriers,misunderstandings or even conflicts,and therefore,what kind of communication skills should be adopted and how to successfully complete the inter-cultural communicative activities is particularly crucial.On the one hand,this thesis is based on Goffman,Brown and Levinson’s Face Saving Theory,Hu Xianjin,Ting-Toomey’s Face Negotiation Theory.By exploring the differences of face culture between China and the west,the author is trying to reveal the reasons and the cultural roots behind it.On the other hand,this thesis mainly selects the film Saving Face as sample research.By making a contrastive analysis and discussion on the intercultural communicative activities,the author tries to find out how the face influence the people’s behaviors in intercultural communication and then makes a valid summary of different strategies in the process of intercultural communication for both the Chinese and the westerners.Lastly,this study aims at deepening the communicators’ understanding of the face cultures and improving their sensitivity to the social cultural and linguistic differences,which can reduce the cultural pragmatic conflicts in intercultural communication.And finally,both the Chinese people and the westerners can benefit a lot from the culture communication and integration.