Abstract:

When Chinese folk literature is explored with Anderson' s idea of a people being an "imagination community", it can be deduced that intellectuals played a crucial role in producing this discipline. There are various explanations for how Chinese modern folk literature came into being, such as the change of economic form, the rise of townspeople, the introduction of foreign theories, the guide of didacticism, etc., but none of them provide a new research perspective of ideology. With the growth of selfconsciousness and the prosperity of global nationalism movements, some energetic intellectuals, based on vernacular Chinese, namely mandarin imagination, "greatly contributed to the construction of people as a social structure and folk poetry as the essence of folk culture", became key figures in shaping Chinese national state, new nationals and new literature at the beginning of the 20th century, thus started a new subject of Chinese modern folk literature.

Key words: folk literature, peoples, intellectuals, imagination communities, producers