Researchers seeking a modern perspective on Asian culture

Researchers
seeking a modern perspective on Asian culture
…………………………………………………………………

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

Americans who
still think of Asians as primarily having “exotic”
or traditional “Oriental” values might be stuck
in the 20th century.

Rice’s
Steven Lewis, Benjamin Lee and Richard Smith are in search
of a more contemporary — and accurate — perspective
on Asian culture, and they believe it can be found in the
messages conveyed through advertising there.

With a three-year
$150,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the three
scholars are researching how civil society is marketed in
a transnational China.

“The rapidly
increasing circulation of people, commodities, technologies
and ideas among Chinese societies made possible by globalization
is changing Chinese culture in fundamental ways,” said
Lewis, senior researcher for the Transnational China Project
(TCP) at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public
Policy. Lee, a professor of anthropology, Smith, the George
and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and professor of
history in the Department of History, and Lewis lead the
TCP as part of a broader, interdisciplinary effort to explore
the changes in contemporary culture caused by globalization.

“With the
end of Cold War rivalries and the opening up of China, distinctly
transnational Chinese middle and upper classes are emerging,”
said Lewis.

Smith, a historian,
agrees. “This pioneering research, spearheaded by Dr.
Lewis, has prompted me to think far more carefully about
the relationship between public images and personal identity,
not only in modern and contemporary China, but in premodern
China as well,” Smith said.

Lewis is intrigued
by the changes he has observed in ads geared toward the
“jet-setting Chinese middle class” and wonders
whether the new lifestyle advertising campaigns could result
in political identities that are no longer national.

A traditional
ad for a sports drink, for example, might picture national
gymnastics athletes in front of a Chinese flag, appealing
to nationalism and suggesting that people should buy the
drink because all Chinese people use the product.

A more trendy
ad for an airline, however, might feature a young, affluent
Chinese couple eating Italian pasta, watching an American
movie and getting ready to fly off to Bali. Rather
than emphasize such traditional values as hard work and
perseverance, the ad appeals to a lifestyle that embraces
cultural products from all around the world and implies
that a more modern person is not afraid to try things outside
the country.

For the research,
the three have collected several thousand images of billboard-like
ads found in the subway stations of Beijing; Fukuoka, Japan;
Hong Kong; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Seoul, South Korea; Singapore;
Taipei, Taiwan; and Tokyo. Those ads have been translated
and coded by Rice undergraduate student Michelle Lin and
Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management student Arthur
Yan. Baker Institute research intern David Ho also has provided
background research on Chinese advertising and survey research
firms.

Because the ads
are useful for student analysis of changing values in Chinese
societies, Shisha van Horn in Classroom Technologies Services
is constructing an interactive archive of the images that
will help Lewis in teaching an experimental seminar this
semester called “Transnational China.” The seminar
is part of an effort to develop interdisciplinary pedagogy
and is supported by Malcolm Gillis, Rice president; Eugene
Levy, provost; Smith, director of Asian studies; and Edward
Djerejian, director of the Baker Institute.

After the archive
and database are constructed, Lewis, Lee and Smith will
contact the individuals and companies that produced the
ads to determine what their intentions were, including the
values honored by the ads and their relation to nationalism.
The final portion of the three-year project will entail
surveying consumers in China to determine whether and how
they may have been influenced by the ad campaigns. The analysis
will be conducted by Rice faculty and scholars at institutions
that are part of the TCP’s network: the University
of Hong Kong, National Tsinghua University, MIT and the
Chinese and Shanghai academies of Social Sciences.

Lewis noted that
Westerners in general seem to forget that 75 years ago,
during the era of globalization and rapid circulation among
Asian societies, the great cosmopolitan centers of Shanghai,
Hong Kong and Tokyo were created; instead, they think about
the five decades of isolation of populations under the great
nation states during the worldwide economic depression,
colonialism and war.

“Now we
have returned to a period of looser boundaries and much
interaction among societies in Asia,” Lewis said. Smart
advertisers are well-aware of that change, as evidenced
by campaigns that target a new generation of “Pan-Asian”
young people who identify less with national culture and
more with middle-class, transnational tastes and preferences
— a blend of European, Asian and American values, Lewis
added.

If such advertising
efforts are effective, “the ability of nation states
to mobilize populations for economic development, international
conflict and other causes will be affected,” he said.

“We were
awarded this grant because we were able to show the Luce
Foundation that interdisciplinary research and pedagogy
are a hallmark of Rice and the Baker Institute,” Lewis
said. “Unlike most larger universities, Rice can quickly
form informal groups of faculty to pioneer collective research.”

The Henry Luce
Foundation, established in 1936 by the late Henry R. Luce,
co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc., supports programs
focusing on American art, East Asia, higher education, theology,
public policy and the environment and women in science and
engineering. The foundation is supporting this research
by Rice faculty to help Americans better understand how
globalization is affecting traditional notions of national
and collective identity in China and other parts of Asia.

More information
on the TCP’s research and pedagogical support programs
can be found on the project’s award-winning, bilingual
Web site, <www.ruf.rice.edu/~tnchina/>.