With the continuous development of Chinese economy and the American economy, their cooperation and communication is increasingly frequent. Chinese and American economic development has continuously growing influence in the world, so the differences of consumption between China and the United States are attracted more and more attention. Different cultural values influence people’s thoughts and ideas. Each consumer forms their own consumption concepts in a certain cultural environment. Therefore we need understand cultural differences and then understand the differences of consumption concepts of China and the United States. So the two countries’ people can know more about each other and cooperate well with each other. Being foreign language learners, we must fully understand the cultural related to foreign language at the same time when we learn the language. Knowing about the culture background will help learners to have a better understanding of language and improve learners’ ability of applying the language. On the other hand, as commercial English learners, understanding the differences of consumption concepts of China and the United States will help us know more knowledge about business and economy, which laid a foundation for future commercial work.

This paper can be structurally pided into five parts. The introduction part shows the research background and meaning. The second chapter is literature review which firstly gives the definition of consumption concept. Second, it offers the classification of consumption concept. In addition, it shows the previous views of others about this research. Chapter three describes the different consumption concepts of China and America. This chapter also gives some case analysis on different consumption concepts between China and America. Chapter four is the analysis of the reasons for the differences. It analyzes the reasons from three aspects, including family income, social welfare policy and social culture concept. At last, this dissertation makes conclusions and gives advice. 

2. Literature Review

This chapter discusses three parts of consumption concept. It firstly gives a clear definition of consumption concept. Secondly, it discusses the classification of the consumption concept. At last, it offers views of previous researches on consumption concept of China and America, focusing more on the contrast of them.

2.1 The Definition of Consumption Concept 

Consumption refers to expend materials and wealth to meet the need of production and livelihood in Chinese dictionary. On Baidu, the definition of consumption concept is that people’s ideas and attitude towards income that they can spend and people’s pursuit orientation of the value of commodity. “We can simply say that the kind of your consumption concepts decides your kind of consumption behavior.”(He Yuan, 2014:53) In this thesis the consumption concept refers to people’s attitude to their disposable income.文献综述

2.2 The Classification of Consumption Concept

There isn’t a unified standard about the classification of consumption concept so far and different scholars can classify it from different angles. From the psychological mechanism of the formation of consumption concept, it can be pided into perceptual consumption concept and rational consumption concept. Our attitude towards to consumption keeps changing, for different time, different people or different countries. From another point of view, classifying it according to people’s attitude towards material and people’s consumption volume, we can know human successively have produced three kinds of consumption concepts which all have great influence, they are the frugal consumption concept, the extravagant consumption concept and the moderate consumption concept. The sustainable consumption concept, green consumption concept and scientific consumption concept are the complementary development of appropriate consumption. This kind of classification is mostly used by people. And this dissertation will study the differences of consumption concept of Chinese and America according to later classification.