Advertisements and a Country in Transition

In addition to selling products and services, advertising also can tell a lot about the cultural milieu that produces it.

Steven Lewis

Take the case of China. Where billboards and subway posters once concentrated on public service announcements warning against spitting or littering, they now feature movie stars selling lipstick, three-person families living in luxury condominiums, and sports cars parked on beaches.

The variation and changing themes in advertising messages indicate to researchers such as Rice University’s Steven Lewis that China’s major cities recognize they must compete not only with small villages in the countryside but also with other Chinese cities and, indeed, cities around the world.

“China’s newest subway systems and the new cities in the interior of China aren’t being built around manufacturing, nor are their transportation systems directed or funded by central governments as was the case in the United States, Europe, and Moscow,” says Lewis, a professor of the practice in humanities, director of the Asian Studies Program at Rice, and head of the Transnational China Project at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. “The development of these cities and the subways that serve their new residents are going to require coalitions of real-estate developers, companies, and local governments.”

According to Lewis, advertising in many of China’s cities, both above ground and in subways, reflects the country’s shift from a planned economy to a market economy with an increasing focus on local economic development. “These city governments must struggle to find the fiscal resources to pay for the social costs of closing state-owned enterprises and downsizing government agencies,” Lewis explains.

How China’s local governments are responding to the country’s decentralization, liberalization, and integration into the global market is reflected in the messages and images of its public service ads and the subways in which they are displayed. Lewis should know. Since 1998, he and nearly a score of Rice University and foreign scholars and students have collected and archived more than 4,000 images of the public service and commercial advertising in the subway lines of Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Singapore, and Taipei.

From the first ads he recorded, which often warned people about things they should not do, such as spit, jaywalk, or litter, Lewis has seen a tremendous difference, particularly in the way they reflect local development needs. “To make the transition from a postsocialist city to a global city, they must attract new capital, people, and technologies,” Lewis says. “This includes changing the historical image of the city that already exists in the minds of domestic and foreign investors.”

As an example, Lewis described Beijing’s desire to replace its portrayal as the home of an enormous bureaucracy and headquarters of the military to a site for information technology laboratories. Murals depicting national historical figures have become crowded with electric billboards displaying multimedia campaigns that ask residents to be socially responsible. Since privatization in the 1990s, the subway station in Beijing, as in several other Chinese cities, has become a small-scale shopping mall, and ads promoting local economic development have begun to appear.

In his book chapter in Globalization and the Chinese City, edited by Fulong Wu, Lewis describes changes in the advertising landscape of Shanghai’s subway system as well as ads in Singapore promoting family planning, education, racial tolerance, public service, and civic morality. In Taipei’s stations, as in many of the other cities’ subways, few public service advertisements appeared until the late 1990s. National and local government ad campaigns have since promoted literacy and encouraged national military service, AIDS prevention, equal-opportunity hiring, and increased awareness of violence against women.

“It appears that the national government sets a broad agenda, but the local governments incorporate what they wish to promote locally into the ads,” Lewis says. “For example, in one Beijing district where most of the high-tech industry is based, the local government produced ads warning against piracy and other technology-related violations.”

Lewis also observed that, while commercial ads appeal to consumers to think of themselves as part of a transnational Chinese middle class, there are still no public service announcements—other than in Hong Kong—asking commuters to help solve transnational or global social and economic problems. And thus far, the public service announcements in Chinese subways do not encourage their passengers to think of themselves as competitors with other cities in a global economy. Still, as technology develops and advertising companies become privatized international enterprises, Lewis predicts that advertising in subways, train stations, and airports in China and around the world could have an impact on how people see themselves vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

—B. J. Almond