Chinese Conflict Management and Resolution: Overview and Implications

Abstract

Two main trends have hastened the need for the world to understand the communication of people from the Chinese diaspora.First, with their large population and the rapid development of their economies in the last two decades, the Chinese people in the mainland, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and elsewhere overseas have gradually formed a powerful network that affects almost every aspect of world affairs.Second, as the world is moving toward a global community, mutual understanding among people of different cultures has become an indispensable requirement for global citizens to live together peacefully and productively.Knowing how the Chinese think and communicate is one way to develop a more interrelated future world.The goal of this special issue, then, is to improve our understanding of the Chinese people(s) by exploring how they manage and resolve those conflicts they encounter in the process of human interaction.Culture and conflict management/resolution have an interdependent relationship with one another.According to Chen and Starosta (forthcoming), three aspects of culture especially influence conflict management/resolution: cultural context, language differences, and thinking patterns.Ting-Toomey (1985) theorizes that differences are found in conflict management/resolution between low-context and high-context cultures.For example, people of high-context cultures tend to enter into conflict when their cultural normative expectations are violated, tend to adopt a non-confrontational and indirect attitude towards conflicts, and tend to use an affective-intuitive style of conflict management.In contrast, people in low-context cultures tend to become involved in a conflict when their personal normative expectations are violated, tend to adopt a confrontational and direct attitude towards conflicts, and tend to use a factual-inductive style of conflict management.Representative studies by Becker (1986), Chua and Gudykunst (1987), Chung (1996), Hsu (1953), Lindon (1974), Ma (1990Ma ( , 1992)), Nomura andBarnlund (1983), andTing-Toomey, Trubisky, andNishida (1989) all demonstrate the impact of cultural context on conflict management.Language differences that affect conflict management are mainly reflected in verbal communication styles.We develop verbal communication styles at the early stage of language acquisition.Because such styles reflect and embody the beliefs of our culture, when we impose our verbal communication style in the process of interaction, conflict can occur (Kochman, 1982).

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