How can one make a sound?, A "City Card" Cultural Soft Power | Rock City | Shijiazhuang
Recently, the news of the "Rock Home Town" music performance season held in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China, has attracted widespread attention. This performance season lasted from July to October this year, and through a series of large-scale rock music performances, a wide range of popular, public welfare, and normalized performance activities were carried out to benefit the people, comprehensively building China's "Rock City".
What attracts attention is that this performance season is not just a simple cultural activity, but also an important component of Shijiazhuang's comprehensive creation of a "city business card" and improvement of its cultural soft power. Media analysis has found that as early as August 2021, Shijiazhuang Mayor Ma Yujun proposed in the government work report to organize and carry out cultural activities with a new era atmosphere, such as music festivals, art festivals, and anime festivals, to form a cultural brand with a large domestic influence, a large audience, high commercialization level, and new exhibition forms, and to create a modern music new fashion with "rock home town" as a unique brand, greatly enhancing the city's cultural soft power.
Shijiazhuang has comprehensively built the "City of Rock and Roll" as its "urban business card", which has a corresponding social and historical background. In recent years, there has been a continuous surge in cultural and tourism marketing, the creation of "city business cards", and the promotion of provincial tourism brands in various regions, with some classic cases having a significant impact. In 2020, Ding Zhen, a Tibetan boy, unexpectedly became popular and became popular in the tourism market of Litang County, Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. Subsequently, a local cultural and tourism bureau director launched a "Smiling and Proud Jianghu Crossdressing Video", which sparked a nationwide trend of "short video marketing" in the cultural and tourism market. In 2021, due to the popularity of short videos on the internet, Caoxian County in Shandong Province quickly gained popularity in its characteristic industries such as asparagus and Hanfu, becoming a shining example of county-level economic development. Since the beginning of this year, Zibo, Shandong Province, has gained tremendous attention and reputation for its "barbecue" which is so popular. Taking over from "Zibo Barbecue", Guizhou's "Village Super" has become the hottest "traffic leader" at present, with its influence overflowing the internet and going abroad, attracting multiple world-renowned media reports. In terms of provincial tourism brands, "Hospitality Shandong" and "Poetry and Painting Zhejiang", which have been deeply cultivated for over a decade, have accurately extracted the essence of local history, culture, natural scenery, and cultural customs, greatly promoting the development of the regional cultural and tourism market.
Compared to these successful cases, similar exploration attempts have also been carried out in some places, but the results have not been satisfactory. For example, in the "short video marketing" craze in the cultural and tourism market around 2021, it is difficult to count the places involved in the "competition", but in the end, there are actually very few that leave a deep impression on people. Many parts of the country have sparked a wave of urban publicity, with numerous city promotional videos, slogans, and cultural tourism image films being launched, which are frequently published and broadcasted in the media. However, more than a decade later, there are equally few "city cards" and regional tourism brands that can withstand the test of time and market scrutiny nationwide.
How can a "city business card" be called loudly? Successful cases may be difficult to simply replicate, and failed cases have their own specific reasons, but the lessons learned from them are still worth summarizing and refining.
Firstly, it should be noted that the extraction of a "city's business card" is not like water without a source or a tree without roots. It cannot construct a castle in the air based on subjective preferences or market preferences, let alone be defined as "slapped in the head" on a whim. It should be built on the unique historical and cultural, natural scenery, cultural customs, and resource endowments of cities and regions, and closely related to the fresh daily practices of local people. Only by summarizing, refining, and sublimating on these foundations can a "city business card" be condensed and become the spiritual and cultural soul of a city, and a distinctive spiritual and cultural symbol.
In this regard, several classic cases are highly praised. The image brand of "hospitable Shandong" not only highly summarizes the historical and cultural characteristics of Shandong, but also significantly highlights the core image of Shandong and its people at present, making it a vivid and direct transmission of information in Shandong's cultural tourism. "Poetry and Painting of Zhejiang" highly extracts the beautiful natural scenery and splendid cultural landscape of Zhejiang, outlining a colorful landscape of Jiangnan mountains and rivers, and spreading a long historical and cultural context. Shijiazhuang, which aims to build the "City of Rock and Roll", has had the soil for the survival and development of rock music in history. Numerous well-known rock bands have emerged, earning it the reputation of the "City of Rock and Roll".
Of course, successfully extracting a "city business card" does not necessarily mean that it is a complete achievement. Behind this, we should also adhere to the concept of "long-term achievements" and continue to invest time and energy in cultivating the spiritual and cultural connotations of the city. In the past few decades, urban construction has focused more on economic achievements, and the cultivation of urban spirit and culture has been relatively weak. In recent years, this situation is rapidly changing. More and more places are placing the cultivation of urban culture, refinement of urban spirit, and enhancement of urban cultural soft power on an important agenda as an important task in urban construction. This work is closely related to the physical form of urban construction, with a square, a building, and street view residential buildings all related to culture and reflecting culture. On the other hand, it also points to the unique urban temperament and spiritual style. To cultivate a unique connotation, form a unique temperament, and radiate a unique charm, a city requires long-term accumulation of historical culture, long-term cultivation and full development of its "cultural personality", and long-term stable and consistent cultivation and care in all aspects of urban construction and governance.
In a broader perspective, urban governance should also realize that culture is also the core competitiveness of a city. Whether a city is suitable for business, livable, and has broad development potential depends not only on how many high-rise buildings it has, but also on its hard power such as GDP, and increasingly on its cultural soft power such as values, spiritual character, and cultural quality. If economic hard power is the "backbone" of a city, then cultural soft power is the "body temperature, temperament, and charm" of a city. It presents a unique personality, possesses personalized charm, cultivates an urban ecology that is difficult to replicate or imitate elsewhere, and obtains an irreplaceable position in the urban competition pattern. If we can view the cultural construction and competition of a city with such a strategic perspective, a "city business card" that embodies the spirit and culture of the city should have enough confidence and strength to be heard and spread.
