Research On The Media Image Of China’s Top Leader Under The New Media Environment

Media is changing the progress of social development. It inevitably changes methods and contents of political communication. Political Communication is an indispensable part in political life. It reflects the interactive relationship between states and the society. National top leader, as an essential element of political communication, is a symbol in a certain stage of nations, building bridges between states and the society. With the continuous development of new media, media forms and communication is also changing. The development of new media will promote the political communication of our country to a new height.The appearance of the image of China’s top leaders are standardized for a long time, the political communication of our country is relatively serious, which lack of personality and attitude. Social media, such as Weibo and We Chat, provide a diverse, interactive, a promising political communication space of China. With the innovative new media technology, cartoon form becomes a breakthrough. It changed the way of China’s old stereotype of propaganda. Political communication of our nation will be more relax, open and friendly in the future.Based on these backgrounds, this paper is committed to explore the top leader image shaping of nations under the new media environment. The paper uses methods such as literature review, content analysis and interview, taking reports of Xi Jinping, reports of APEC in 2014 and the cartoon form in “xinhuanet.com” as examples. Evermore, this paper explores the comments of audiences by interviewing, try to find the effect of the political communication on the image of our leadership. Furthermore, this paper takes Obama as the main example, in order to provide a reference to the communication of image of China’s top leader by introducing the experiences of other countries.All in all, this paper found that the new media has been infiltrated into the image of political communication. Political communication in China uses multimedia presentation; the content looks simple and beautiful, while paying attention to build an interactive platform. The image of leader is a breakthrough, becoming more confidence, wise, mind, friendly and full of foresight, especially looks closed to the audiences. Audiences are almost satisfied with the cartoon form. Cartoon from is a symbol, reflects the perspective of political communication towards equality, political communication is much more three-dimensional, political communication process tend to profession.Compared with the experiences of other countries, the image of China’s top leaders is still insufficient, the media is a mere formality which cannot effect the content of shaping the image of our leader truly; the interaction and feedback platform is still not perfect; the scale of cartoon image still have a big gap compared to foreign top leaders. Based on these backgrounds and foreign experiences, this paper makes recommendations from three aspects: expanding distribution channels, enriching the content of image of leaders, and making interactive platform towards perfect.