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Patterns of Global-Local Fusion in Chinese Internet Advertising 99 Introduction The space of cultural production and representation is mostly inhabited by the images and goods pertaining to the everyday life of the population. The present study attempts to study the cultural transformations of China via an investigation of the image and language resources deployed by multinational as well as local corporations for promoting their products on the Internet. Although Internet advertising is not yet the most dominant mass advertising medium in China, it has been growing at an unprecedented rate. The Internet was first introduced into China in 1994 and by the end of 2003 there were 79.5 million Internet users, 308.9 million online computers and more than 595,550 websites in China, according to the thirteenth report on China’s Internet development from the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) on January 15, 2004. According to this report, of regular internet users in China, 18.8 percent are aged below 18, 34.1 percent are aged between 18 to 24, 17.2 percent are aged between 25 to 30, and 12.1 percent aged between 31 to 35. In total, 63.4 percent of Chinese Internet users are aged between 18 and 35. Feng (2004) investigated the use of values in Chinese internet advertising and found that there is a trend of progressive Westernization among Chinese youth. The Internet has become a dynamic force in China’s cultural landscape. “Get online!” is the slogan of millions of China’s young people (Liu 2004). Correspondingly, Internet advertising has also kept pace with it. The first web advertisement in China appeared on the homepage of the website, Sohu in July 1997; by 2003, the total income from Chinese Internet advertising reached RMB¥3,000 billion. A study of Chinese Internet advertising can thus provide us with a window on how China is assimilating global popular culture while maintaining and reinventing its local peculiarities. 5 Patterns of Global-Local Fusion in Chinese Internet Advertising Doreen D. Wu 100 Doreen D. Wu Globalization and the rise of commercial popular culture in China With the accelerated growth of advertising in China, increased attention has also been paid to examining its textual practice and its related cultural communication. Most previous studies tended to focus on the content of an advertisement and on the aspect of value appeals — one important dimension in the textual construction of advertisements. Based on the method of content analysis developed by Pollay (1983), a number of these studies (e.g., Chan 1995; Cheng 1994, 1997; Chung 2007; Ramaprasad et al. 1995) have indicated a distinct trend of value changes in Chinese advertisements as: a change from emphasizing the utilitarian, economical values of the advertised product to emphasizing the symbolic, experiential values of the advertised product. They have argued that as China is becoming a consumption-oriented society, it shows similar trends of the development model for a global consumption society as envisioned by Leiss et al. (1990). Furthermore, as China is entering the capitalist world’s economic system and increasingly influenced by the global culture-ideology of consumerism, a number of other studies (e.g., Cheng and Schweitzer 1996; Feng and Wu 2007a and 2007b; McIntyre and Wei 1998) have shown another distinctive trend of value changes in Chinese advertisements: a change from promoting Chinese cultural values such as family and tradition to promoting modern Western ones such as hedonism and self-fulfillment. In addition, rather than simply calculating the decrease or increase of tradition/Chinese versus modern/Western value appeals in Chinese advertising, Zhang and Harwood (2004, 168–169) tried to examine their data in more detail, exploring ways in which the different cultural value systems are beginning to overlap and be used in mutually complementary ways. They found that while traditional family values were being used to promote modern products, Western values of beauty and youth were utilized in promoting local products. Nonetheless, apart from studies on the content and the aspect of cultural values, very few scholars have attempted to investigate ways in which the resources of language and visual images, i.e., the possibility and range of bimodal and bilingual textual construction, are deployed in Chinese advertising as means of cultural representation and production. Ye and Qin (2004) examined Englishmixing in Chinese newspaper advertisements in Guangzhou and attributed this simply to the forces of globalization. It is apparent that much more research is needed to examine the range of bimodal as well as bilingual...

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