Identity And Memory:The Construction And Propagation Of The Yellow Emperor Symbol

The "history of origin" of the nation shared by the members of the community is the most important historical memory of a country.Huang-ti,who has long been regarded by Chinese as the ancestor of the nation,naturally constitutes a special memory symbol.The national identity is condensed and perpetuated through the historical memory of the Yellow Emperor which carries the imagination of common origin.The flow of the memory of the Yellow Emperor reflects the evolution from Huaxia to China,which is a clue to our understanding of the construction of the modern nation-state and the formation of the concept of the Chinese nation.The study about the national meaning of Huang-ti mostly adopts a view of constructivism,regarding Huang-ti as "the invention of tradition" in late Qing,ignoring its historical image.In fact,the changes of the image of the Yellow Emperor are continuous,the construction of the image of Huang-ti began as early as the pre-Qin period,and the modern narrative of the Yellow Emperor and the historical text showed the characteristics of continuity and fracture.Secondly,most studies stop at Xinhai Revolution in their investigation of the changes in the Yellow Emperor’s symbols,ignoring the process of consolidation of the connotation of the ancestors of the Chinese nation accompanied by the development of the identity of the Chinese nation as a whole and the intervention of state power after the establishment of the Republic of China.At the same time,the media plays an important role in the shaping of memory,and the common memory of specific historical events and characters needs to be preserved,shared and reproduced through the intermediary mechanism of texts,rituals,geographical space and other media,the media participates in the forging and continuation process of historical memory,and the dominant narrative of Huang-ti is constantly reinterpreted in the context of different eras and media environments.Based on this,this paper attempts to pay attention to the‘text" or "narrative" of Huang-ti as historical memory,and examines the flow of the yellow emperor’s historical memory in different historical periods and different media forms from the perspective of communication.To explore how the historical memory was formed,disseminated and changed in different historical periods,how the Yellow Emperor gradually evolved from an ancient mythological figure to the recognized ancestor of the Chinese nation,explore the relationship between the media and the shaping of historical memory,and then reveal the particularity of the Yellow Emperor symbol and memory shaping.