Still Killing Us Softly, with Chinese Characteristics

For years in my writing courses in the US, I’ve used an assignment that involves close analysis of print advertisements from popular magazines. Typically, I begin the lesson by showing Jean Kilbourne’s Still Killing Us Softly—a short film that provides students with a good introduction to reading the imagery and ideology of advertising, with a primary emphasis on the impact of advertising on body image for women.

The assignment can be eye opening for students. It is often the first time anyone has asked them to pay attention to advertising, despite the fact that they live in a world inundated by it. And they generally impress me by having better skills at interpreting images than in noting the subtle details of literary texts. I usually feel a sense of idealism when I teach the unit—an awareness that I’m accomplishing something more at such moments than merely teaching students how to write academic prose. I’m teaching them how to be observant citizens and how to think about what they see.

Last week, I attempted a similar lesson with my students at Wenzheng College. If anything, such instruction seems more vital here than it is back home. My students are all very personable but also nearly all lacking in critical thinking skills. They still have committed to memory dozens of classical Chinese poems they learned as schoolchildren; however, when prompted to answer discussion questions after a reading assignment, they tend to read verbatim from the text. They look at me with puzzled expressions when I ask them not to quote from the text but instead to use their own words and think for themselves.

No doubt, these tendencies stem from traditional Chinese educational values that have their roots in Confucianism, a trunk that survived the axes of the Mao era, and branches that endure today despite the dizzying pace of social change. Chinese education favors memorization over analytical skills, rote learning over problem solving, and hierarchical deference over open discussion. In these respects, my students closely resemble preceding generations of Chinese students. In other respects, however, they are quite different—unlike any students ever seen in China before.

The source of this difference is two-fold. The students I’m teaching are products of China’s one-child policy—a policy that has stemmed the country’s population growth but also altered the structure of the Chinese family in the process. China has become a nation of only-children, and the traditional gravitational pull of the family has shifted away from veneration of the elders toward adoration of the child. By chance, this has happened at exactly the same moment that the opening of the Chinese economy has given birth to a Chinese popular culture driven, as it is in the West, by advertising. The intersection has produced what might be called the first mass consumer generation in China.

It is difficult to conceive of just how much Chinese society has changed over the course of my students’ own lifetimes. They are all about twenty years old. They were born into a China where, beyond the propaganda of the state, advertising was virtually unknown. They have come of age in a China where it is completely unavoidable. In the epilogue to her history of the Boxer rebellion, Diana Preston recollects visiting China in the years immediately after Deng Xiaoping initiated his economic reforms. Looking out the window of her bus in Beijing, Preston saw streets almost entirely void of cars, filled instead with bicycles whose riders were uniformly clad in drab Mao suits. The parents of my students lived in this world, but for the students themselves, the scene that Preston describes bears no resemblance at all to the China they have come to call their own and which I am witnessing now with my own eyes. The ubiquitous presence of advertising is among the most obvious signs of change in China. It has infiltrated every available space: it’s on the sides of busses, on billboards lining the roads, on t-shirts and ball caps, on TV and the Internet, and on the glossy pages of the Chinese editions of fashion magazines imported from the West.

As I do when I teach this lesson in America, I stressed with my Chinese students that advertising sells not only products but also a system of values. This concept has a special resonance here in China, for it’s not only the foreign companies that have cracked the Chinese market. For better and for worse, foreign values are part of what’s being imported as well.

I didn’t need to look too hard to find advertisements to use in the lesson; a single issue of the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan supplied me with everything I needed. Despite the text in Chinese characters, Chinese Cosmo differs little from her elder sister in America. I selected twenty advertisements for the students to analyze, with each advertisement selling something beyond a product: ideals of beauty, success, happiness, power, and sexuality. The ads often tell a story about how to achieve these ideals but never raise the question of why Chinese people ought to abandon one set of ideals in favor of the consumerism of the West. I doubt that anything in my students’ education has equipped them to raise such a question, much less to answer it.

Not surprisingly, given the nature of Cosmopolitan, the ideal of beauty is emphasized above all others on its pages, and this ideal of beauty is a hybrid of Chinese and Western standards. Many of the ads feature models of European descent in ads that were created for Western audiences and reconfigured with a few Chinese characters. And while many other ads do display Chinese models, these models bear little resemblance to the Chinese women that I see on the street and in my classroom. Instead, they are Chinese women with wide eyes, full lips, wavy hair, and exceptionally pale skin, skin so pale that it surely was produced with significant digital altering of the images.

Repeatedly on the pages of Cosmo, the visual message is that white is right and beautiful. It should be noted that this association is not a Western invention. It originates in part in feudal Chinese standards of beauty in which pale skin was a marker of the aristocratic status that could keep a woman out of the sun. However, the rise of a consumer culture marks the first time the ideal has been package as products fit for mass consumption. At least a dozen ads appear for products that promise to whiten a Chinese woman’s skin. Those who named the products lack the sense of either irony or shame: Perfect White C, Pond’s White Beauty, Chinfie Whitening Emulsion, Bi-White, White Glamour.

Nearly all of my students are young women—more than ninety percent in fact. This made the discussion seem all the more relevant to me. As the students closely examined the ads I had distributed to them, I moved about the room and talked with them. I was struck by the degree to which the association between white skin and beauty had been accepted. Nearly all the young women agreed that paler skin was more beautiful than darker skin, and most stated that that they would eagerly buy a product that could lighten their own skin. None appeared aware that many of the whitening agents contain high levels of mercury and are thus far more likely to poison them than to alter their pigmentation.

I mentioned to the students that this identification between white skin and beauty in China could be damaging to women’s self-esteem, for it has elevated an image counter to nature to the position of an ideal. No doubt, this is great for business, for if we seek something that we can never have, we may come to believe that beauty and in turn happiness are just one purchase away. But for Chinese women, the new consumer culture has brought along with it new anxieties as well. Increasingly, Chinese women may come to resemble their Western counterparts in terms of the body image problems that Jean Kilbourne discusses. A young woman that I saw at Auchan one day embodied the point. She was a girl with a lovely face but an anorexic frame, with legs thinner than my arms. Surely, the Chinese people knew starvation in Mao’s time, but he needed no assistance from them to achieve it. In this sense, the glossy images of fashion magazines may have a power to move minds that surpasses even the Little Red Book.

Between the time I started writing this entry and the time that I’m finishing it, I evaluated the ad analyses that my students composed. Many of them merely described the ad at face value, producing a paraphrase rather than an analysis. Some even noted how much they wanted to buy the product after seeing the ad. This was disappointing but not surprising, for these students have little experience with critical thinking.

However, in the subsequent class meeting, there was a moment that made the whole exercise worthwhile. We were discussing the changes in Chinese society brought on by the opening of the economy. In a nation that experienced much depravation during the twentieth century, the standard of living in China has dramatically improved—at least for those living in the coastal cities that have experienced the most rapid economic growth. But the benefits come at a cost, as at least one of my students recognized. Her English name is Chanel, chosen in honor of her favorite Western perfume, a choice that has made of herself a kind of advertisement. During the discussion, Chanel said the changes in China were generally for the best but troubled her nevertheless. When I asked her to elaborate, this was her reply:

“I worry that we might forget what it means to be Chinese.”

That indeed may be the heart of the matter.