The Structure of Chinese Values: Indigenous and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

This book explores Intercultural communication; cross-cultural communication; social psychology; cross-cultural psychology and Chinese culture.

In the context of globalization, values, as one of the cultural cores, play a central role in people’s daily communication. This book starts from a psycholexical approach to extract an indigenous Chinese values structure and then relates the locally derived values structure with the cross-culturally and empirically validated Schwartz’s individual-level human value contents and structure. It intends to find the culture-specifics in the values structure of Chinese people and meanwhile examine Schwartz’s universals in content and structure of human basic values in the context of transforming mainland Chinese society.

The world needs to better understand Chinese people’s behavior and Chinese culture at the increasing contact zones. Values are the central channel to know and understand Chinese societies, people and culture. This book offers such an opportunity for readers to know Chinese culture-specific and culture-general values through a series of empirical studies.

This book is unique in that there is still no research found starting from a psycholexical approach to study Chinese values structure in the literature. It can be said that this book is the first attempt to explore the values structure of Chinese.