Advertising

When speaking about advertising in the People’s Republic of China (henceforth the PRC or China), we are immediately faced with a fundamental distinctive feature: China is one of the last communist countries in the world where commercial advertising constitutes an uncomfortable presence, and yet, since its official return in 1979, it has seen tremendous growth. Despite the birth of advertising in a broad sense on Chinese soil dating back to ancient times, the development of modern commercial advertising allegedly started in the second half of the 19th century. Following the golden age of Chinese advertising in the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of this burgeoning industry was interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the Civil War (1945–9). With the ascent of Mao Zedong and the founding of the PRC on 1 October 1949, a phase of neglect by the Chinese authorities started, and this reached a peak during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In 1979, thanks to the process of economic reform and opening up launched by Deng Xiaoping in December 1978, advertising was formally reintroduced to China and started to prosper throughout the country and across a wide range of media. In the last four decades, Chinese advertising has managed to become acknowledged as an indispensable tool in the country’s economic expansion and an accelerator of domestic consumption. Nonetheless, it is still considered a controversial phenomenon, as it constantly reminds the Chinese authorities of the country’s ambivalent attitude resulting from its socialist heritage and the striving for capitalist growth, and it threatens to destabilise the status quo with new forms of ideological pollution, such as Western ideas, values, and lifestyles. Consequently, Chinese advertising is subject to strict government regulations and controls, and is the addressee of rectification campaigns aimed at maintaining its ideological correctness and adherence to the Party-State’s political agenda.