The Great Oracle·V Perspective丨Sui Qian: "Borrowing a Boat to Go to Sea" Made Oracle "Win Fans" Overseas
2024-08-08
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When you think of my country's cultural heritage, what do you think of? The Great Wall? Terracotta Warriors? Mogao Grottoes? We have to mention the even older oracle bone inscriptions. At the end of 2017, the oracle bone inscriptions submitted by my country were successfully included in the Memory of the World Register, and their historical and cultural value has been further recognized by the world.
On August 7, at the launch event of the "Great Oracle" top news channel, Sui Qian, executive director of the Brand Research Office of the National Image Communication Research Center of Tsinghua University, accepted an exclusive interview with a reporter from Dahe.com while attending the event.
How to solve the problem of "flowers blooming inside the wall are fragrant outside the wall"? Sui Qian believes that although China's global status and influence are increasing day by day, if Oracle wants to truly go international and go global, the key is to make the first move of integration and innovation.
Photography: Wang Zheng
How to “integrate”? Use communication and dialogue as a way of speaking
Faced with the crisis of multiple identities, the essence of current global cultural exchange and communication is to answer the question of “who am I” internally and explain it externally.
Who are oracle bone inscriptions? Sui Qian said, "Oracle bone inscriptions are not only a kind of written symbols, but also a carrier of the culture of an era. The international dissemination of oracle bone inscriptions must make it clear what unique values and core concepts of the Chinese nation it conveys to the world."
To this end, Sui Qian suggested that these values and core concepts should be expressed in a communicative and dialogic manner to attract people from more countries to participate in the discussion, application and promotion of these concepts.
"Only in this way can we eliminate the cognitive bias caused by cultural differences as much as possible and promote a broader understanding and recognition of Chinese culture among the world's people," said Sui Qian.
What is "new"? Realizing cultural innovation in the transition from the old to the new
Realizing cultural innovation in the transition from the old to the new is the key to enabling tradition to survive and maintain its vitality through self-evolution.
Sui Qian believes that the international dissemination of oracle bone inscriptions must explore and utilize contemporary communication methods that are truly integrated into people's production and life, such as artistic and design methods, so as to continue to maintain the original cultural identity in the midst of change.
The creative transformation and innovative development of China's excellent traditional culture is a process of "encoding-decoding", and the disseminators of culture are the main body of encoding. Based on the symbolic representation of oracle bone inscriptions, how can we empower the construction of China's discourse system?
Sui Qian suggested that for the morphological "coding" of traditional cultural symbols, we should first select traditional cultural elements that can be integrated into modernization and embody China's credible, lovable and respectable temperament, so as to enhance the appeal of cultural symbols and build a Chinese discourse system that connects the past and the present, dialogues between China and the West, and is vivid and three-dimensional.
Sui Qian said, "The criteria for identification and selection should include three aspects. In the horizontal dimension, it should take into account the spiritual level, the material level, and the behavioral level; in the vertical dimension, it should include distillable symbolic meanings, positive national spirit, and complete cultural implications; it should have continuity towards history, creativity towards modernization, and extensibility towards globalization."
In Sui Qian's view, this will enable people from other countries to truly understand the richer and deeper connotations of Chinese culture, including the ideological system, values, aesthetic orientation, etc.
Secondly, the international dissemination of oracle bone inscriptions is inseparable from the historical and cultural background of their creation, and the unique artifacts, concepts and rituals of the Shang Dynasty. Therefore, we must be good at understanding and capturing the civilizational characteristics represented by oracle bone inscriptions from these levels, and integrate them into the dissemination model that adapts to the needs of overseas consumers.
Sui Qian particularly emphasized the combination of culture and enterprises or enterprise products. He believed that business is an important field for expanding the application scenarios of traditional cultural symbols. He took the traditional cultural elements such as calligraphy, Chinese red, and the unity of man and nature that were incorporated into Li Ning's emerging fashion concept in 2018 as an example, "I hope that oracle bone inscriptions can also rely on the charm and appeal of its own cultural heritage to enhance the trust of foreign consumers in Chinese-made products."
How to attract fans? "Borrowing a boat to go out to sea" Multi-level communication
The dissemination of culture is like a grand relay race. In this race, there are no lone runners, only closely coordinated teams.
Sui Qian believes that for the international dissemination of oracle bone inscriptions, we must also deeply integrate the communication potential of new and old media, and establish a multi-channel coordinated, juxtaposed, and staggered external communication system for traditional cultural symbols. The content and means of communication should fully consider the attention and acceptance of overseas audiences.
"In the eyes of some overseas audiences, the expression of traditional Chinese culture can be somewhat obscure and difficult to understand." In the process of cross-cultural communication, Sui Qian suggested that one should be good at telling one's own story in the other party's language and construct a "dialogue" style of communication in a language that the other party can understand and accept.
At the same time, traditional cultural symbols can be used to design the content of the dissemination of Chinese traditional ideas by means of "borrowing a boat to go to sea" with the help of foreign mainstream media, cultural and museum institutions, professional channels and other professional media. Sui Qian suggested, "With the help of the platform and influence of overseas media, traditional cultural ideas can be spread in a way that is most acceptable to overseas audiences." (Liu Gaoya/text Hu Hanze/poster intern Li Wenjing)
