In Search of Paradise by Li Zhang

Author:Li Zhang [Zhang, Li]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780801448331
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2010-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Advertising Jieceng

The making of zhongchan jieceng goes beyond the spatial reconfiguration of communities and consumption practices. It is also realized through another closely related domain—mass advertising for new homes. Real estate developers not only manufacture homes, they also construct and spread new notions of zhongchan jieceng and a distinct set of ideas, values, and desires. Through the powerful tool of advertising, these widely circulated ideas and images become a primary source of social imagination through which the urban public comes to conceive what it means to be middle class and how its members should live. Advertisements for private housing frequently make explicit linkages between a particular lifestyle (embodied foremost in one’s housing choices), a set of dispositions, and one’s class location. At a press conference, a Kunming-based developer once declared that its ultimate goal was to “target the professional elites and create a utopian community for this special group of people to converge and develop into a clearly defined jieceng so that they can live an integrated, pure upper-class life.” Thus, developers do not simply sell the material products (houses); they also sell the cultural packages and symbolic meanings. Yet, as Pierre Bourdieu (2005, 23–24) has convincingly argued, the power of home advertising lies in its ability to evoke dormant consumer desires and render them hypervisible by creating an aura around the commodity object. This is a dialogic process, rather than a one-way invention: “We know that, like all symbolic action, advertising is most successful when it plays on, stimulates or arouses preexisting dispositions, which it expresses and provides with an opportunity for acknowledgement and fulfillment” (Bourdieu 2005, 55).

Let us take a closer look at one of the advertisements published in a major newspaper, Yunnan Information Daily. The advertisement was titled “Town Houses Are Really Coming!” and it took up an entire page of the newspaper. It was sponsored by a real estate corporation that was building a large residential community. The lower half of the page is a picture of a smiling young Chinese woman embracing rosy flower petals while at the seashore. The caption below reads: “The platform of the middle-class’s top quality life: although not villas, the Sunshine Coast Town Houses are a special, tasteful living zone that specifically belongs to the city’s middleclass.” The upper half of the page is a carefully crafted narrative on what town houses are, where they come from, and what they stand for. Because most Chinese people are unfamiliar with the history of town houses and their social index in the West, developers can easily manipulate the symbolic importance of this kind of housing. The opening section of the article identifies town houses as a preferred way of life for new middle-class families: “In the year 2000, a brand new living space called ‘town house’ ignited the buying zeal of China’s middle class. From Beijing and Tianjin to Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, town houses have caught the eyes of all urban middle-class people and have become their top choice in reforming their lifestyles….

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