.1930's Popular Culture: The Metropolis Of Modernity Imagination And Searching

In 1930s, Shanghai, with its unique geographic situation and humanistic environment,ranked 5^th among cities in the world. In the poor and backward old China, Shanghai was shining with modernity by its prosperity, fashion, dynamism and energy, attracting later generations to construct modern imagination for it.The modernity of old Shanghai originated from the Western world, but was borned out of traditional China. Meanwhile, it maintained special local colors and language features and gave expression to a kind of metropolitan modernity. Enlightened by the western modern thoughts, the early Chinese intellectuals resorted to painstaking search for modernity. Despite the far - reaching influence, their efforts ended in failure. The 1930' s Shanghai ,with its outer fashionable prosperity and inner fused West -China characters, embodied material and spiritual modernity.It was in this particular language environment that the mass culture, represented by ShenBao, emerged. As product of modern society,the mass culture showed the cultural transition of the modern society. Just in this modern wave, ShenBao grew into modern media. Different from both ancient newspaper and religious newspaper, it won in competition with other commercial newspaper, constructing, conveying and spreeding modernity in changing modernity.The western researchers, held that the construction of modernity fall into 3 categories:economicN political and daily life system construction. And there were two ways of pursuing modernity:one was "liberation politics", with the aim of founding new modern countries; the other was "life politics",with the purpose of changing daily life. The process of China' modernity,to a certain extent, was demonstracted and promoted by the early mass media. The early Chinese intellectuals, in their pursuit for modernity, depended on the early media to arouse the national spirit and imagine the modern country,but in vain. Although it awoke some country fellows, the influence proved limited and could not reach the majority of the masses. The 1930' s, ShenBao, in its search for modernity, with civil culture "suit for both the nobel and the popular taste" ,displayed the metropolitan ideology and broadcasted the modern pursuit of cultural spirit. On the other hand, ShenBao incarnated the aesthetic imagination and search for modern democratic country, endeavoring to achieve the modernity of the political and economic system in daily life mode. Femail imagines were specially the overthrowing of male-femail inequality and the capitalism interweaved by colonialism, feudalism and capitalism, without healthy body and matrix. Therefor,its "modernity" was not enduring. Only when the whole nation was guided onto the runway of modernity, Shanghai could accomplish genuine and everlasting "modernity" .