The Transformation of Chinese Animated Cultural Symbols within a Socio-political Context (1956– 1989)

Abstract

Between 1956 and 1989, China’s socio-political environment underwent a transformation through three distinct phases: the exploration of national identity, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform and Opening-up. This paper integrates Banks and Morphy’s theory of visual representation, Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding, and cultural identity theory to form an analytical framework. Through semi-structured interviews with ten experts, combined with an analysis of representative animated works, it explores the interactive relationship between the socio-political context and the evolution of cultural symbols in Chinese animation. The research reveals that Chinese animated cultural symbols are not static but, in response to contextual shifts, exhibit consistent phased transformations across three dimensions: symbolic content, semantic function and identity construction. The sources of these symbols shifted from traditional culture to revolutionary ideology and then to a coexistence of diverse elements; their semantic function evolved from aesthetic expression to political propaganda and subsequently to a pluralistic and open approach; and the imagination of identity transitioned from national cultural identity to class identity and finally to pluralistic identities. Taken together, these three dimensions demonstrate that changes in the socio-political context have simultaneously reshaped the content, functional positioning and identity references of cultural symbols. This paper summarises this evolution as the historical logic of ‘Ethnic Construction Revolutionary Reconstruction Diverse Regeneration’, which not only clarifies the internal logic of the evolution of cultural symbols in Chinese animation during this period, but also provides a new research perspective for visual anthropology in understanding cultural production within non-documentary visual media.