Fission Culture - Modern Shanghai People's Consumption Picture

The Companion Pictorial enjoyed excellent performance in modern China. It's a market-oriented magazine without political interference, covering the largest readership with utmost impact. As an important part of the magazine, advertisements on 1920's- 1930's Companion displayed a new urban consumer culture, which reflected progress and pain brought with social transformation very profoundly.This paper starts with the relationship between consumption and advertisement and traces its development in china. It will focus on advertisements of Companion and present transformational characteristics in modern Shanghai through analysis on material and spiritual life's change, female identity, medicine advertisement and consumer mentality, then come to the conclusion that a neither Chinese nor western, but either Chinese or western culture had been created in modern shanghai when shanghaiese integrated foreign culture with local lifestyle. Considering the superiority of western culture, this cultural intermarriage evolved into urban modernity.