A Study On The Construction Of China’s National Image From The Perspective Of Visual Symbols

With the acceleration of globalization progress, the boundaries between countries and regions has become blurred, countries and regions have gradually had a close relationship, and traditional information barrier has been broken.As the modern society is increasingly maturer and the public media became more and more prosperous, inevitably, globalization is the real context of international communication and external communication.It is the globalization that leads to the profound changes of the whole international communication context, showing the features of openness and diversity.Due to the uneven media resources, the current discourse power is still in the hand of western medias. As the largest developing country, China should pay more attention to the improvement of external communication ability and the enhancement of its soft power,including the national image shaping, to voice more and occupy a position under the unbalanced communication order.Nowadays, with the rapid development of media technology, people often get a understanding of the outside world through the Internet, television and films.The most prominent feature of the mass media is to transfer information by using the visual symbols like images and pictures. It is evident that picture is intuitive,real and vivid. What’s more important is that it needn’t coding,which enhances the authenticity and naturalness of the news and expresses both the denotation and the connotation implying the national ideas and its ideology. Thus,visual symbols play an increasingly important role in the intercultural communication of national image.In this era, national image shaping is the manifestation of the national soft power,as well as the self-identity and its ability to construct in the intercultural communication.From the theoretical perspective of visual symbol,taking the web pictures of the APEC in Beijing as examples, this thesis discusses the problems about the construction of China’s national image and reveals the similarities of and the differences between the self-shaping of national image and the construction of national image by others, based on Saussure’s biaxial analysis model and Roland Bart’s meaning analysis pattern,so as to find out the visual symbol communication strategy of the construction of China’s national image.The study is divided into three parts, as follows:First, Chapter One and Chapter Two compose the first part, including the literature review, the meaning and objective of the research, the theoretical framework, the research method,the research thinking and the article scheme.The second part is the main component, namely, Chapter Three to Chapter Five,this part analyzes the denotation and connotation of the photos of 2014 APEC summit, as well as the visual symbols of China’s national image shaping on the micro and macro level,clearing their overall expression and details. Besides, it will explain the reasons for the similarities of and the differences between the self-shaping of national image and the construction of national image by others, like the cultural difference and cultural shock.Last is the conclusion and summary. The above analysis figures out the the visual symbol communication strategy of the construction of China’s national image: firstly, use the visual symbols to shape the national image; secondly, enrich symbols to interpret China’s idea; and optimize the symbol combination to tell China’s story.