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5/15/2006

China's subway ads and what they say about a country in transition

Public service advertising in subway stations of China's cities reflects the country's shift from a planned economy to a market economy with an increasing focus on local economic development, according to a Rice researcher who has archived such ads since 1998. Where once they concentrated on warnings against spitting or littering, now they feature movie stars selling lipstick, three-person families living in luxury condominiums or sports cars parked on beaches.

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Advertising can tell a great deal about a country's cultural, social and political climate. This is particularly true in China's subway stations, where ads in some cities urge the country's rapidly growing urbanites to be patriotic and law-abiding, frugal and independent, and others promote AIDS prevention and environmental protection and try to develop citizens' consciousness for paying taxes.

Overall, the variation and changing themes in advertising messages tell researchers such as Rice University's Steven Lewis that China's major cities recognize they must compete not only with the countryside, but with other Chinese cities and 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 U.S., Europe and Moscow," said Lewis, a professor of the practice in humanities, director of the Asian Studies Program at Rice and head of the Transnational China Project at Rice's Baker 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," explained Lewis.

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.

In a book by Fulong Wu titled "Globalization and the Chinese City," Lewis wrote about the political and economic implications of new public spaces in China and Asian global cities. 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 in which they reflect local development needs.

"In order to make the transition from a post-socialist city to a global city, they must attract new capital, people and technologies," Lewis said. "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 trying to refashion the way urbanites view their cities as their homes like Beijing, the local governments use the subway billboards to show, for example, movie stars selling lipstick, or three-person families living in luxury condominiums or sports cars parked on beaches," Lewis said.

In his book chapter, Lewis also described 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, encouraged national military service, AIDS prevention and 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 said.

"For example, in one Beijing district where most of the high-tech industry is based, the local government produced ads warning against piracy and cracking down on 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.

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 the technology develops, and the 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.

Future comparative studies will archive advertisements from the subway stations of Tokyo, Seoul, Fukuoka, Osaka, Mexico City and Washington, D.C., as well as conduct surveys of commuters to assess what impact they may have upon those passing through these new public spaces.

In addition to exploring the influence of media in China's new public spaces, Lewis has researched the development of privatization experiments, energy policy, and central-local government fiscal relations in China and other transition economies. He is widely published and a frequent commentator on Chinese affairs for U.S., Chinese and foreign media.

For more information, contact Lewis at swlewis@rice.edu or B.J. Almond in the Office of News and Media Relations at balmond@rice.edu.