The Young Companion And The Folk Culture Report Research

The Young Companion occupies an essential position in the history of Chinese journalism history. The development of The Young Companion stayed closely with Shanghai’s urbanization process, fierce business competition as well as rapid economic and social development in Republic of China, a precious reflection of the social transition in Republic of China.Under the influence of political forces, uneven economic development, and western culture,the development of folk culture in the Republic of China started to show imbalance, particularly obvious compared with any other periods. To meet the hierarchical features of folk culture, The Young Companion, in excellent planning consciousness, adopted various report practices to report part of material, spiritual and social folk culture, which in certain degree unveiled the internal fracture and stratification structure of the folk culture. In this paper, we analyze 174 editorials of The Young Companion between 1926-1945 as the research object, and focus on the images and texts concerned with folk culture. After researching, we conclude that the folklore reports in the The Young Companion can be classified into three types: material folklore reports,spiritual and social ones.As for material folklore reports, The Young Companion focused on costume and transportation folklore. The former one mainly introduce in the perspective of women to show it in terms of multi-ethnic and cross-regional diversity, and the latter one was introduced less,receiving large impact from the transportation construction reform. Festival, life rituals and folk entertainment can be found in the social folklore reports. The social ones have achieved the transition from the local to nation, as well as the urban to the rural. In the spirit folklore reports,The Young Companion stressed on the folk beliefs and arts, while the former one embodied in Buddhism, taking other faiths into account, the latter is intended to popularize the knowledge of art to people.In the process of dissemination of folk culture, the pictorial has accumulated a lot of valuable experience which is still beneficial to the mass media today.