Abstruct
Nationality and distance can’t defeat love. Crossing-border dating is not new for people and media in the world. Nowadays, more and more Chinese young people and foreigners begin to choose their spouses freely on Chinese TV dating programs which are very popular in China. The paper mainly focuses on the some stories of foreigners on the Chinese TV dating programs, analysis and discusses about the failure cases of foreigners who wanted to look for their Chinese girl friends for dating from a perspective of intercultural communication. Finally, the paper indicates that culture may be a strong and invisible power and an important component part of successful dating factors in different cultural social backgrounds, so that learning different cultures will be adapted to different social cultural customs and to different social events including dating programs on TV.
Key words: culture, social custom, intercultural communication, dating, Chinese TV dating program, intercultural communication competence
1. Introduction
Love is always the main focus of people discussion, it is enduring a long time. Not only in China, but also in the world, Nationality and distance can’t defeat love. Once Chinese young
people mainly focused on the traditional dating where one man found a spouse in realistic way through parents and friends and knew more abut her whom he was likely to build the romantic relationship, and then two people were set up and got married. As time goes by, the Chinese young people begin to choose their spouses freely. Nowadays, competition becomes heavier and there are lots of single older people, Since some young people’s spouse standards are much higher and their parents always urge them to get married, they seldom find the ideal spouse in realistic life. In order to cater to this social phenomenon, a new type of dating way emerges, that is, dating program on TV (Wang, 2011).
Especially in recent years, in China, there has emerged various kinds of dating programs like: If you are the one, One out of a hundred, Falling in with love, Fight for the love etc. These satellite TV dating programs are very popular among the old and the young, men and women. Meanwhile, more and more young foreigners were attracted and showed up on TV dating programs so often. Most of them really come for looking for a “wife” as a goal, and maybe some of them only looking for a “girl friend”. Foreigners are coming to participate in those TV shows for different purposes. However, TV shows are inviting random guys to send them their CVS, so the TV show producer can pick some guy he like and contact him etc. They do that because it can pop up the TV show’s rating at least for a little bit, so they can make profit ( Shen, 2012).
No doubt, some of the foreigners on these dating programs were seriously looking for a “wife” or “girl friend”. On these dating shows, the author found that many young foreigners could speak Chinese well, but knew a little of Chinese cultural knowledge, especially some social customs and traditions including Chinese dating and marriage. Therefore, it’s necessary for us to study on the young foreigners’ languages and behaviors on these dating shows form an intercultural perspective.