The Social And Cultural Changes In Beijing From The Perspective Of City Images And Advertisement

Since the 1980 s,China has undergone tremendous social changes,and at the meantime,there is huge change in Beijing's city image.Beijing,as the capital,is carefully planned and built,which has a clear change of the artificial town planning and natural growth.Beijing has a long history of substance to form a unique cultural landscape.The image of the city is the urban civilization heritage and collective memory of generations of people,as for its cultural changes that have significance to explore,with unique city cognitive.‘While it may be stable in general outlines for some time,it is ever changing in detail'(Kevin Lynch,U.S,The city of the image).This conclusion is literally right in the urban development.But when regarding the revolution of the society,it may went wrong.During the current half century,in the progress of Chinese revolution,old cities like Shanghai,Hangzhou,Suzhou,Kaifeng,Xi'an,Nanjing undergone tremendous change,regardless those new emerging cities.Skytowers,flyovers,high ways have fully covered the quadrangle dwellings,Hutong,Linong,Historic Gardens and cities with concrete,adding some mordern marks to the historic town.In these cities,the image of historic and modern could come together with the increasing compatibility.It seems they have their own characteristics from the opposite view,but is rebuilding the unique city of image.Among the numerous changes,advertisement is no doubt to be the most active environment image in Beijing.The urban buildings added new elements for the city image.Also,more and more lightings,landmarks,skytowers and screens are forming a new landscape.Those changes obviously happened together with the flyovers,highway,skytower,commercial centre,and are forming the main character of metropolis.However,advertisement or media—no matter what kind of it,they are all temporary and variable.From this point of view,advertisement is the most fast changeable environment image.Advertisements have the most obvious characteristic of postmodern.It broadly spread the features of the advertisement: Temporary,massive images and shallow content connected with culture.One side,the advertisement aggravate separations between old and new.On the other side,it changes the city image with its own active temple to forming a new modern city.Undoubtedly,since 1980 s,the revolution is literally changing the city image of Beijing,a new city which is more and more far away with the previous one.The socialist in Poland,Piotr Sztompka suggested a measurement of social change,“How do we know what kind of times we are going to face? And a very simple test method is to look at the field of social change is to touch the ordinary people's daily life”(Peter Shostu Puka,Poland,”Sociology of social change” translated by Lin,Juren,Peking University Press,2011 th edition of the Chinese version).Based on this method,the modern fetures are blending in the city image with unbelievable speed with flyovers,highways,sky towers,commercial centres and advertisements.It also changed the way that how people live and act.Therefore,it provide a new angle for us to work out the social and culture change happened in Beijing.