Framing Chinese Advertising: Some Industry Perspectives on the Production of Culture

Modern advertising returned to the People's Republic of China in 1979. This relatively young industry, despite growing at an annual rate of 15%, is institutionally unstable. Standing at the intersection between cultural production and commodity production, advertising is shaped by its structural relationship with the media and corporate sectors, both of which are reined in by the socialist state despite the growing trend of infrastructural diversification within these sectors in recent years. In China where media are still state-owned, changing media policies have impacted upon advertising in a way unprecedented in world advertising history. A similar parasitic relationship holds true for advertising and the corporate sector. In May 2000 a new tax law, capping corporate advertising expenditure at 2% of its annual gross revenue, predictably implicated the advertising industry in a heated debate over the crossover of regulatory jurisdiction. Justifiably, the uproar was targeted at the National Tax Bureau for its failure to consult this new policy with the official organ governing the advertising sector-the State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC). All this serves to illustrate the mutual dependence of the media, advertising and the corporate sectors on the one hand and the urgency of framing advertising research in the context of institutional studies on the other. Speaking of advertising as a cultural institution adept at communicative selling is to anchor it at the crossroads where the sector meets all other institutional forces that shape consumer culture. This paper unveils two key issues with which Chinese advertising industry is preoccupied at the moment-the institutional constraints of the sector and the issue of localization. An industry perspective is crucial to our understanding of what it means to talk about China's advertising culture beyond hermeneutics. Much needs to be critiqued about representational approaches which often pare advertising down to its 'content'-approaches made more problematic because increasingly, advertisements in China, as elsewhere, are made for target audiences to which the academic interpreter may not belong. Advertisements need to be understood as products first, texts second. In that regard a production-centred and institutional perspective on advertising has much to offer to a field approach, or more specifically, a look at the branding process that involves both product positioning and communications planning, goes beyond the immediate goal of this short paper. The industry perspective introduced here is of a modest order but issue-oriented so that the institutional conditions which gave impetus, and in turn, …