Value Systems and Applications: A Comparative Study of Chinese youth in Kunming and the youth in Hong Kong

Abstract

The social and cultural environment of a person's living environment implicitly holds the values held by its members and individuals. The nature of values and its unlimited amount of interpretations and nuances acknowledged in literature is offset by a somewhat uniform understanding that motivation and behaviour in society is a function of values. This paper poses to contextualise values in general before it focuses on interactions and drivers of accepting and rejecting values. It briefly refers to the evolution of values before reflecting on the nature of the ethnic Chinese population in Hong Kong and Kunming, China and their historical exposure to different environments. After outlining the methodology the paper reports on data findings based on clustering values in Hong Kong and Kunming, China. Data indicate that the common Chinese ethnic background has little influence on ultimate value clusters for the two groups.