Summary:
China’s ideological transition from a communist country toward a consumer society provides an unprecedented context in which to explore the rise of consumerism in a contemporary society. We examine how advertising appropriates a dominant anticonsumerist political ideology to promote consumption within China’s social and political transition. We show how advertising reconfigures both key political symbolism and communist propaganda strategies through a semiotic analysis of advertisements in the People’s Daily. Our structural framework of ideological tran-sition extends Barthes’s myth model and examines ideological transition in ad-vertising from the macroperspective of political ideology. This framework goes beyond the transfer of cultural meanings and can help to explain ideological shifts in other societies.
For full text:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/588747
