The Mutual-Construction of Cultural Memory for Chinese Cross-Cultural Researchers

IntroductionCross-cultural research in the sense of modern science of China started from 1980s. Due to the strong dependence for language tools of cross-cultural research, the scholars and teachers in the foreign language community become the major force in cross-cultural research field within China at first (Jia, 1997). Later, with the development of international academic exchanges as well as the improvement of China's foreign language teaching, the cross-cultural research connected with the international community gradually. Now, it covers communication, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, culturology, sociology and other subjects, and these subjects continuously intersect and integrate with each other. China's cross-cultural researchers also move beyond the circle of foreign language teachers, and they spread over various related disciplines, especially over linguistic culturology, international relationship and national studies (Hu, 1999).The researchers play an essential role in China's diplomatic exchanges and cultural construction. To analyze and research the cultural identity of this group will be beneficial to the clarification of other countries' understanding of China's cross-cultural researches, at the same time, it will also carry out related works in a deep-going way and create a foundation for communication theories suitable for their own cultures.China's cross-cultural researchers mainly learn and master one or more foreign languages after they studied their mother tongue. At this time, they are already the mature cultural individuals in China from the sense of sociology. In the socialization process for decades of years, their thinking modes and behavior patterns have already left an indelible Chinese cultural imprint, which is the guidance for personal behavior and the criterion for judging other people's behaviors. In the process of cross-cultural research, the culture carried by foreign languages, namely the ideas, values and world outlook embodied in the culture will be surely connected with the Chinese cultural imprint formed before. The result of the connection is repulsion or mutual-construction. The repulsion will lead to confusion for cross-cultural researchers, whereas the mutual-construction will encourage the formation of new culture, which is a rational integration of Chinese culture and foreign cultures, as well as a value galaxy based on recognition and understanding. Therefore, the mutual-construction is the direction for the author to explore and analyze the cultural memory of Chinese cross-cultural researchers.Language and CultureLanguage and culture are the important definitions in human beings' scientific and academic history. The numbers of definition for culture, according to the statistics made by scholars, had exceeded 450 at the beginning of 1980s (Chen, 2001); as for language, there are also some descriptions from different perspective, such as physiology, psychology, pedagogy, anthropology and sociology. For the two definitions, because different scholars have different researching aims and interests, then their starting points and ending, as well as the perspective for seeing questions would be varied, so there are a lot of definitions and descriptions. In order to discuss more conveniently, this paper regards language as a symbolic system which has material outer covering for pronunciation and generally speaking possesses documented form, created for the communication and exchanges for human beings.The culture embodies the thoughts for people towards nature and society, and the resulting values, as well as overt behavioral patterns. From these, we can see that culture, originated from the ideas for human beings towards nature and society, has relationship orientation; and that the goal of language is to enhance the communication and exchanges for people, so, the language has relationship coordination. Then, we can come to the conclusion that language and culture are interdependent and cannot be separated from each other. …