Recently, the National Social Science Fund major project "Research on my country's Cultural Soft Power Development Strategy" research team, with Professor Wang Yichuan from the School of Art and Media of Beijing Normal University and Professor Dong Xiaoping from the School of Liberal Arts as chief experts, spent nearly half a year on A national college student survey shows that among 270 Chinese cultural symbols, the top 10 most representative ones are: Chinese (Chinese characters), Confucius, calligraphy, the Great Wall, the five-star red flag, traditional Chinese medicine, Mao Zedong, the Forbidden City, Deng Xiaoping, and the Terracotta Warriors and Horses.
This study shows that contemporary cultural symbols generally lag behind traditional cultural symbols. For example, among contemporary character symbols, Han Han, Song Zuying, Jay Chou, Teresa Teng, etc. all score after 200. Scientists and contemporary new technology symbols, such as Yuan Longping, Chen Jingrun, Lenovo, Baidu, etc., all scored around the middle line; literary image symbols, such as Sun Wukong, Lin Daiyu, Ah Q, Xu Sanduo, etc. also scored after 200.
Wang Yichuan said that college students generally believe that intangible cultural symbols and traditional cultural symbols have more promotion value, but do not pay enough attention to contemporary cultural symbols and literary and artistic symbols. This is raising a new question for us: how to enhance the influence of contemporary Chinese art culture, technology, and media symbols by improving the national artistic literacy under the current new situation. At the same time, the convergence and rationalization of college students’ choice of cultural symbols and their separation from daily cultural interests remind us to pay attention to the invisible bicultural personality and fluid personality of contemporary college students. These should become important issues in the development and construction of my country’s cultural soft power, and they are also new issues faced by Chinese art theory in the new century. (Li Yanan) (Source: "Science and Technology Daily")