中西方文化交流

On The Exchange Between Chinese and Western Culture Abstract:

It seems our world become smaller and smaller, we have to face more and more foreign culture, what should we do? In this article, I will introduce conflict, complementarity and coexistence between Chinese and western culture to try to get solution on problem of culture exchange.

Main text:

What is culture? I think it is very difficult to make anaccuratedefinition for culture, In fact, there are many kinds of definition for culture now. As realistic existence in society of human beings, culture have the same history as human beings, in other word, the development history of human beings also is the history of culture. And the same time, the difficulty to define culture also shows that culture contains a lot of content.

Most of culture exchange between Chinese and western happened in the modern time, and in the ancient time, this two kinds of culture was born and developed in a relative close environment, which result in a big difference between Chinese and western culture.

In traditional China, The Yellow River and The Yangtze River are the two birthplace of Chinese culture. The appropriate natural condition is the fundamental of long-history Chinese culture. Agricultural culture always taken an important position, people advocate harmony between man and nature, although there were many wars, they still tend to make a live peacefully each other. Some people believe in the Buddhism, and most people treat the Confucian as standard they have to follow with.

In traditional western world, the leading culture is different in different time,In general, the western culture went through three kinds of culture: the Greek culture, the Roman culture and the Christ culture. These three culture lead to Cultural diversity in western world. The Greek culture advocate harmonious, the Roman culture set up the Sound legal and prosperity of society, the Christ culture regard heaven as the end-result of every person. And this thought lead to the people’s folly in the middle

ages.In modern time, the western culture mixes these three kinds of culture together, which lead to a different kind of culture from Chinese culture: they respect every person, they go after knowledge. It is from The Greek culture; at the same time, they like conquering other race, they are eager to expand land, which is from the Roman culture.

When it comes modern time, with the development of industrial civilization in western world, the westerners are not satisfied with what they have possessed, so, they look forward to the rich materials in eastern world, by weapons and opium, they open the door to China. Regardless of willing or not, the exchange between Chinese and western culture begin!

It is hard to avoid the conflict when different culture exchange.Generally, different culture has different belief, different way of thinking, different traditional customs, when they meet, it is sure that they are going to conflict. When this conflict happened in one person, he may be confused, shocked, even angry to foreign culture in thought, as a result, he will criticize and reject to this culture. If this conflict happened in a group, even a nation, if it is serious, they maybe solve the problem by the way of war.

In my opinion, the conflict between Chinese culture and western culture is different in different time. From 1840 to 1949, the conflict mainly be showed by the ways of national. Chinese is occupied by invaders, the foreign culture take a powerful position, national culture take a weak position, at that time, those westerner declared that western culture is good and Chinese culture is terrible, although some people still reject to receive, this rejection is useless. From 1949 to now, the two culture are equal, during this period, the conflict is showed by the way of personal. Especial after reform and opening up, the atmosphere of society is open, most of people is willing to accept foreign culture, but some people are still reject foreign culture. For example, in recent years, more and more foreign festival appeared in china, such as Christmasday, but some people criticized that we forgot our ancestors by celebrate foreign festival, because we are wild about those foreign festival, while we ignore our traditional festival, such Dragonboat festival. We like Santa Claus, while we do not know who is Quyuan. Indeed, this is a problem, how do we solve it? At least, it is not necessary that we rejected foreign culture completely. It doesn’t solve any problem!