The Construction Of "Republic Of China Image"on People’s Daily(1949-1966)

As one of the most important "history recorders", media is a major basis for the formation of history memory. Also it is shouldering the social responsibility of how to look at the past, examine the resent and prospect the future.In the current of history "structural amnesia", along with the development if new media, the history memory has been diversified and fragmented. So it’s more important for us to reflect on the role media should play in the formation of historical memory.This paper takes the People’s Daily as an example, which is the most representative mainstream newspaper in China continent. And collect all text samples in seventeen years from October1,1949up to May15,1966before the eve of Cultural Revolution that relates to the history of the Republic of China. Use the research methods of content analysis and text analysis to explore the construction of the image of the Republic of China. Including the selection, construction strategy for the history topics and its construction effects.Through the quantitative statistics we can see that, the main text type in the seventeen-year period is commemorating report. Followed by analoge report. From the perspective of genre, the memoir of witness, comments and comunication are the mosts. On the content categories, characters, events and descriptive reports of the social picture each account for1/3. And on the source of news and the writers, the parties or relevant personnel occupy the largest proportion.On the selection of topics, during the seventeen-year period, People’s Daily has obvious "selective memory" characteristics on its discourse of Republic of China. Mainly it takes the review of the development and struggle of Communist Party of China as the basic clue of historical development. Military theme occupies nearly30%of the total. The reports of the Communist Party occupy more than40%of total sample size, which are the most. While avoid or selective weaken the historical contributions of other social forces including the Kuomintang and democratc parties. For the presentation of the Republic culture, in addiction to Lu Xun as the representative of the few cultural figures. Mainly shows the overall backwardness under the reactionary rules."Poor and weak old society" is the image label of the Republican era.In the specific construction strategy, it follows the "dualism" thinking of sonstruction with strong political ideology colors. In the narrative techniques, It has the characteristics of theme concise, implant of myth thinking and heroic discourse. Besides, In the period the seventeen-year, appear the flourishing of folk history writing campaign."Turning and accusing" has become the text type which has a distinct characteristic of the times. The resulting effect is that, the history of Republic of China shows a strong revolutionary feature. The change of writing subject arouses people’s "subjectivity", and finally, establish the new national collective memory which conducive to the ethnic cohesion.