A major objective of this book is to identify the key determinants of the "East" and the "West" in the field of intercultural communication. It examines but also counter-attacks essentialist and culturalist analyses of intercultural communication between China and the rest of the world. Offering a cross-country examination and comparison of drought awareness and experience, this book shows two fields of research, which are complementary but rarely found side by side, i.e. the Arts and Intercultural Encounters, serve as illustrations for theoretical and methodological discussions about intercultural communication between China and the West. Scholarly and media discourses will find this work thought-provoking, instructive and informative.

Fred Dervin is Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He also holds other professorships in Australia, Canada, China, Luxembourg, Malaysia and Sweden and has widely published on identity, interculturality and mobility/migration in different languages. He is the author, amongst others, of Interculturality in Education: A Theoretical and Methodological Toolbox (Palgrave,2016). Regis Machart is Senior Lecturer (Modern Languages) at Universiti Putra Malaysia and Adjunct Professor (Intercultural Education) at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His interests include intercultural communication and intercultural/multicultural education, representations of the Other in the media and fiction, construction of identity, discourse studies as well as academic mobility. He co-edited, amongst others, Cultural essentialism in intercultural relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).