The Young Companion(Liangyou) Pictorial, one of the leading visual media was founded Feb. 1926 and suspended Oct. 1945. During that period(The period of the Republic of China), which is known for the turbulent era of the crossroad of traditional and modern times, and also that of tension and conflict between orientalism and occidentalism in Chines history, it issued total 174 volumes(172 periodicals and 2 special features), and performed its tasks excellently in the history of Chinese pictorial before the period of the Republic of China was founded.
In the years of 1920’s to 1940’s, The Young Companion(Liangyou) Pictorial in Shanghai recorded the city’s modern metropolitan images and presented those to its readers. And Moreover, it also introduced the modern life ideas, led the fashions of them, and framed the modern images as well.
This research explores, by the analysis of the magazine, not only the aspects of the birth of modern mass, the detection of it, and its mass-calling-out-modes, but also the discoveries of new daily life style spontaneously representing desires and senses of the mass. And this paper, on these findings, goes further to examine the historical significance of substantial structural change and cultural modernity in modern Chinese literature.
The results of this study can be summarized as followings.
1. First, The Young Companion(Liangyou) is a kind of the result of shaping and expanding of modern self that the modern visual-centered perspective created. So, In Chinese modern and present times, new values have been expanded and reproduced by the influence of mass media. That is to say, the birth of modern mass progressed side by side with the growth of consumption-cultural media, and scope of mass also expanded by constant calling out mass who were consuming modern era under the colossal effects of that consumption-cultural media.
2. Second, this research considers how the mass, through reading The Young Companion (Liangyou) Pictorial, discovered what modern daily life and the aspects of it should be. The Young Companion(Liangyou) uses mass-calling-out strategies effectively by stimulating the ideal of the daily life of modern cities and imagination of it.
3. Third, The Young Companion(Liangyou) Pictorial, under the project of seeking for the new modern life, adopted mass-calling-out-modes to involve the conscious readers and to attract the mass. This research looks into how its mass-calling-out modes are performed, by mainly focussing on its viewpoint of offering the modern knowledge, its cover models, and its advertisements. In this regards, this study analyzes its mass-calling-out modes as two different ones ― conscious mass-calling-out mode and unconscious mass-calling-out mode.
4. Fourth, this paper examines that the mass-calling-out modes of The Young Companion(Liangyou) approaches the mass through its narrative discourses and strategies adjusted at the level of the reading mass. The Young Companion(Liangyou) involved and called out readers and the mass by means of the conscious approach toward a new life, that is, modern daily life.
5. Finally, through the cultural prism of the discovery of modern mass and its daily life, this study tries to read poetically the various characteristics of cultural modernity from the viewpoint of mass life history.