Cultural understanding for the development of an American-Chinese cross-cultural simulator

The need for effective cross-cultural training has been recognized throughout the United States Army, Department of Defense, and the wider business and education community as critical to successful international relationships. However, achieving effective cross-cultural capability training currently requires long-term immersion into foreign culture which is a large investment of both time and resources. This paper will focus on the development of key cultural stress points, analyzed by Hofstede's cultural dimensions, that will provide the cultural groundwork for a computer-based, linguistically-sophisticate, real-world-oriented virtual simulator to achieve the same goals of developing cross-cultural expertise as from long-term immersion but without the same initial investment requirement. This paper will develop the socio-cultural basis for the virtual, computer-based, Chinese-language simulator and will serve as a framework on which similar projects could be undertaken for various other global cultures. By isolating these cultural stress points, the specific aspects of culture that cause conflict between American and Chinese perspectives, this paper will develop socio-cultural content that will make the simulator culturally significant. This research and the associated fieldwork conducted both in mainland China and on Taiwan are broken up into four components. This paper, sequentially, focuses on the relevant cross-cultural competency theories and previous cultural education research, significant historical cultural norms and traditions that are unique to the Chinese-speaking world, and then how these unique aspects of Chinese culture manifest in modern China in both informal and formal interactions. This research, coupled with fieldwork, will isolate cultural stress points between American and Chinese culture and target scenarios in which these stress points are exposed. The end result is the development of Chinese-language dialogue trees of these stress-point exposure, real-world cultural scenarios that can be incorporated into the development and improvement of the virtual simulator.