CCPTM &ADCULT PRC

CCPTM &ADCULT PRC 　　This paper offers a perspective on mainland Chinese popular culture õ；both official and mass market õ；by focusing on certain aspects of theevolution and manipulation of contemporary advertising.In particular ，it discussessome of the issues arising from the intersection of advertising and popular cultureon the one hand ，and politics and propaganda on the other.In exploring this，I will venture some observations on the impact of commercial culture upon the mechanismsthrough which the Chinese Communist Party is promoted and promotes itself withinthe public media.Of particular interest here will be the role played by influencesfrom abroad and by China's home-grown ö ；avant-garde ìin the Party's remouldedimage-making.China's official（that is ，state-funded ）propaganda and entertainmenthas ，for some years ，been developing a style of ö ；corporate advertisingì。Much studied in relation to the US mass media，corporate advertising promoteslegitimation in a number of ways，including through the appropriation of the meaningof national and cultural traditions ，and the manipulation of what have been termedö ；paleosymbolic scenesì（the private and subjective meaning of scenes representedin terms of and linked to public ideological contexts ）。[1]The Party's multi-facetedpropaganda/public-relations organizations increasingly represent it through a statist-corporatevoice that offers basic definitions of group morality and ethics，consensus，coherenceand community in ways more familiar to us from international corporate advertisingpractice than Maoist hyper-propaganda.The Party today not only manipulates routinepublic pronouncements and orchestrated news reporting to achieve this end ，butit also pursues its goals through a range of national media entertainments and promotions.It achieves this through the Party Propaganda Department，the government instrumental；ities devoted to public enlightenment like the Ministry of Culture and the Ministryof Television and Broadcasting（recently subsumed under the Ministry of Information），as well as a myriad of subordinate organizations：Party newspapers ，Central TV，Central People's Radio，and so on.At other times，the Party's messages are conveyedthrough non-Party organs and allied mass media that are directed at one level oranother by in-house Party committees.Such committees function both as surrogatesfor Party authority and as representatives if not mediators for non-Party interests.As a result they are enmeshed in a complex of relationships that range from thepurely propa；gandistic-ideological to the corporate-promotional.