Advertising discourses and social changes in China : an investigation of the changing advertising discourses in Yangcheng Evening News and Nanfang Daily from 1980 to 2002

Abstract

The present study aims to unveil the changing ideologies in China from a discourse analytic perspective, with a particular focus on the advertising discourses in Yangcheng Evening News and Nanfang Daily from 1980 to 2002. Advertising discourse has long been considered as marketing and a socio-cultural artifact. By highlighting its ideological functions, this study has taken the fundamental principle of critical discourse analysis and developed a top-down multi-dimensional approach, which integrates the investigation of the macro ideology, of intermediate institutional ideological variations and of a micro multi-dimensional discourse analysis. A corpus of 364 stratified randomly-sampled advertisements was obtained from Yangcheng Evening News and Nanfang Daily in 1980 and 2002, which represent two major newspaper types in China, i.e. the popular newspapers and the Communist Party newspapers. It is found that at the micro level different power groups were privileged to have access to the advertising discourses in different socio-historical settings. The advertising discourses in 1980 could be characterized as "the danwei-dominated advertising discourses", represented by the prevalent danwei-oriented advertising topics and by the frequent use of utilitarian value appeals, the strong presence of factual visual images and the omnipresent obligatory move structures in the verbal aspect. Conversely, the advertising discourses in 2002 could be summarized as "the individual consumption-dominated advertising discourses", represented by the prevalent individual-consumption-oriented advertising topics, and by the frequent use of more hedonistic value appeals, more experiential visual images and more persuasive optional move structures in the verbal dimension. The multi-dimensional changes in the advertising discourses from 1980 to 2002 reflect that different power groups in the advertising discourses have different needs and interests in the specific socio-historical settings. In addition, it was also found that while governed by the same macro ideology, the advertising discourses of Yangcheng Evening News and Nanfang Daily manifested multi-dimensional discourse variations due to their institutional ideological variations. The important contribution of this study lies in its investigation of the broader ideological functions of the advertising discourse in China and a holistic top-down multi-dimensional approach it has developed as a methodological development of critical discourse analysis.