Environmental Advertising in China and the USA

Situated at the intersection of environmental communication and psychoanalytic theory, this book offers a cross-cultural comparison of green advertising in China and the US. As the world’s two largest consumer economies, China and the US both face intense environmental problems due to their rising consumption of goods, waste production and demand for natural resources. Since its inception in the US in the late 1980s, green consumerism has been widely hailed by marketers as an efficient solution to environmental problems. Upon its introduction to China in the 1990s, academics and the government also embraced the idea and aligned it with the official rhetoric of "building a harmonious society." However, the Chinese consumers are slow to warm up to eco-friendly products. To the current day, hybrid cars are praised and not purchased; organic foods are distrusted and shunned and eco-fashion does not feature in designer studios.

By comparing green advertisements from China and the US, this book addresses the different notions of "green", the types of desire that motivate green consumption and how they are shaped by ideological, cultural, and historical differences. Applying a combination of semiotic, rhetorical, and psychoanalytic methods, the book analyses the underlying structures of desire in green advertising and examines the psycho-cultural differences that disrupt the translation of "eco-friendly" appeals to China. Using case studies from eco-fashion, organic food, green home products, and hybrid cars; the chosen examples correspond to what the Chinese consider as the four basic human needs: "yi, shi, zhu, xing" (clothing, food, shelter, and transportation). Rather than arguing the superiority of the American or Chinese version of green consumerism, the book interrogates the role of consumerism in the global spread of Western ideologies and explores the possibilities for local consumers to resist transnational corporations’ hegemony in the environmental movement.

This book fills an important gap in the critical scholarship on green marketing and should be of interest to students and scholars of environment studies, green advertising and marketing, environmental communication and media studies, China studies and environmental sociology, ethics and cultural studies.

Xinghua Li is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Babson College, USA.