Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2007

Eight conflict handling styles emerged as statistically unidimensional in the development of this new model: avoiding/smoothing, obliging, integrating, compromising, dominating, coercing, deceiving, and ingratiating. Scales for these styles were tested for construct validity in dyadic conflict scenarios among peers. Preference for styles were found to vary according to (1) independent and interdependent self-construals, (2) ingroup or outgroup membership, and (3) benefit-issue. Independence correlated positively with integrating and compromising, and negatively with coercion and deception. Interdependence correlated positively with avoiding/smoothing, obliging, compromising, deception, and ingratiation. Subjects were more obliging, integrating, and compromising toward ingroup than outgroup members; and slightly more coercive and deceptive with outgroup than ingroup members. Subjects were more deceptive in other-benefiting issue situations than in self-benefiting ones.

Macro sociopolitical milieu and micro interpersonal interaction are intimately connected, since transformation of one’s cultural identity is realized in the ways in which one interacts with others through words. This paper outlines the modern Taiwanese cultural landscape — engendered through political, social, linguistic changes, as well as modern technological advances — which gives rise to new forms of talk. Political openness and rising local consciousness, changing social values to prioritize the self, emphasis on multiculturalism and multilingualism, revolution in modern technology and communication devices, and so on, have contributed to ways of language use diverging from traditional Chinese cultural values. No longer a subdued, other-oriented, reserved society subscribing to traditional cultural norms, Taiwan has embraced new forms of talk as it stands at a turning point. In light of the need for a contextualized and updated understanding of Chinese communication, as in the case of Taiwan, it is argued that many taken-for-granted assumptions endorsed through lens of “collectivism,” must be scrutinized and re-examined.

After the change of sovereignty in Hong Kong from Britain to China on July 1st, 1997, the status of Putonghua (the language of the new Chinese ruler) has been formally recognized in addition to Cantonese (the vernacular language) and English (the international and ex-colonizer’s language). Four years after the political handover, a Matched-guise test was conducted on a total of 1048 local Hong Kong Secondary 4 students. The aim of this study was to ascertain the respondents’ subjective reactions towards the three languages when the city was undergoing significant political and socio-economic changes. The results showed that the Cantonese guise was rated the highest on traits of solidarity, the English guise the highest on traits of power, whereas the Putonghua guise was rated the lowest in both dimensions. Although the study started from a micro perspective investigating the attitudes of the respondents towards the three target languages and their speakers, the research results helped to reveal the vitality of the three target languages in post-colonial Hong Kong and suggest directions for language education.

In this article I first discuss a genre of writing, the Ars Dictaminis, which became popular in Europe from the 11th century and which flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries. In particular I consider the arrangement of letters as advised in Ars Dictaminis treatises and show its influence from Cicero. I then briefly review key tenets of Chinese rhetoric and compare the arrangement of Ars Dictaminis letters with the arrangement of Chinese letters of request recently written by Mainland Chinese. The remarkable similarities in the arrangement of these two sets of letters are noted. Given these similarities I conclude by arguing that the relative status and power of writer and recipient exerts at least as strong an influence on the arrangement of texts as any cultural tradition.

This study compared language choices made by Vietnamese speakers in a circuit-board manufacturing company in California with utterances constructed for similar situations by Vietnamese speakers in Hanoi, Vietnam. Particular attention was paid to how both groups of speakers signaled social relationships during talk at work, primarily through their selection or omission of Vietnamese address forms and other honorific markers. The California supervisor and assistant, during high-pressure problem-solving events, bypassed the use of kinship terms and, instead, chose non-honorific terms and other markers of informality, thus invoking a normative frame of teamwork and open debate about courses of action that pervade the contemporary American workplace. Excerpts of videotaped interactions between these California workers were shown to the Hanoi participants, after which they were asked to imagine a context in Hanoi similar to the one that they observed. Their constructed utterances were found to contain a variety of address forms — mostly personal names and kinship terms — along with other honorific and politeness forms. The Hanoi participants tended to incorporate these forms even within the economy of talk found in high-pressure moments. In including these forms, they highlighted the hierarchical relationship between the interlocutors as elder and younger, superior and subordinate. Their inclusion of these expressions reflects a cultural norm: the salience of maintaining interpersonal relationships in the workplace, which are managed elegantly through the Vietnamese person-reference system. The findings in this study suggest evidence of a shift in the norms of language use by Vietnamese immigrants living and working in the United States.

Adopting the analytic method of critical discourse analysis, this study explores, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the quotation patterns in two ideologically opposed newspapers in Taiwan, namely the pro-unification United Daily News and the pro-independence Liberty Times. It is found that in reporting Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian’s “one country on each side” statement, both newspapers prefer to use indirect quotations. However, there are significant differences in their selections of quotation contents and quoted speakers. The same speaker is quoted as saying completely different things by the two newspapers, which are also more likely to quote those who voice their positions on the controversial news event. As a result, this study has demonstrated that the choice of quotation patterns is by no means objective or neutral and presentations of speech in the news tend to be loaded with ideological bias.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of social status of the communicator on communication predispositions of people with different cultural orientations. Based upon independent and interdependent self-construals as individual-level cultural dimensions, people’s degrees of two distinct communication orientations (communication apprehension as an avoidance orientation and argumentativeness as an approach orientation) were assessed in a dyad with different status of communicators (professor as high status and classmate as low status). Participants were a total of 702 undergraduates studying in Japan, Hawaii, and the mainland U.S. After reading two hypothetical conversational situations with different status communicators (professor and classmate), participants were asked to rate items measuring two communication constructs (communication apprehension and argumentativeness). The data indicated that individuals showed greater level of argumentativeness in the conversation with a low status communicator (classmate or roommate) than in the conversation with a high status communicator (professor). On the other hand, individuals showed greater level of communication apprehension in the conversation with high status communicator (professor) than in the conversation with low status communicator (classmate or roommate). We also found that, among people of high interdependence, the level of CA was greater in the conversation with the high status communicator than in the conversation with the low status communicator. On the other hand, among people of high interdependence, the level of argumentativeness did not differ in the conversation with the high status communicator as compared with the conversation with the low status communicator.

This article examines the analogous views of liberal Chinese rights scholars during the late Qing and post-Mao eras. The author identifies thinkers from both periods who have argued fervently in favour of a rights (rather than duties) based society in which human rights are the birth right of all human beings irrespective of age, gender or class. In both cases, scholars have challenged a predominantly illiberal state orthodoxy on rights, Confucian during the late Qing and Marxist during the current era. Significantly, however, it is only during the contemporary period that liberal rights thinkers have impacted on the official position. Whereas late Qing scholars failed to convince the state to adopt a more universalist, rights-oriented perspective, China’s current crop of rights thinkers are having more success in this regard.