Contrastive Narratives of Overseas Bloggers from the Perspective of Intercultural Communication

Abstract

In China’s intercultural communication practice, presenting a truthful, multidimensional, and comprehensive image of the nation to overseas audiences and gaining their acceptance and recognition is of vital importance for measuring communication effects. The research focused on the contrastive narratives of videos released by overseas bloggers about their trips to China on YouTube with the “#chinatravel” tag from the perspective of intercultural communication. The research shows that the video contents of overseas bloggers focused on three major themes: “travel”, “culture”, and “technology”, with sentiment analysis featuring a polarized characteristic, predominantly positive but still containing negative contradictions. From the narrative perspective, the sample videos generally adopted a contrastive narrative strategy, forming three core themes of contrastive narratives and mostly present China through a first-person perspective. The contrastive narrative strategies played a positive role in breaking down stereotypes and enriching the narrative dimensions of real China, while the intercultural communication of Chinese culture still faces challenges from cognitive differences.