Communicating Across Cultures With People From China

Efforts to understand and describe the Chinese, especially their unique values and communication patterns, have been a particular focus of academics, language learners, diplomats, missionaries, and businesspeople for a long period of time. With developments in cross-cultural psychology and intercultural communication studies since the 1970s, many comparisons have been proposed and elucidated between the Chinese and specific Western cultures. However, some scholars question whether the cultural differences noted are really as distinct as reported. Others wonder if these possibly reflect reactions to cultural other opposites (how they must be different from us), attempts at sense making to try to explain or validate personal experiences with or overgeneralized and essentialized descriptions via misunderstood or distant observations of certain Chinese people or populations (Do the Chinese actually ...