Logos, products and testimonials: Consumer culture and nationalism

The calendar beauty was eye-catching, and the calendar itself useful, but in the end these items were still made for a practical purpose:  to sell a product. How does this advertisement display its product, and what might this indicate about the ways the item was manufactured, sold and used? In fact, this advertisement tells us much not only about commerce in China circa 1929, but about Chinese nationalism as well. 

I:  Foreign products and marketing in China

It notes that the products of the China Petroleum Company (中華美大煤油公司) are provided by the American Richfield Oil Company.  Kerosene was one of the foreign products that penetrated deepest into early twentieth century Chinese society.  Standard Oil was particularly famous for successfully marketing kerosene far into the Chinese countryside by selling lamps that made its use safe, and through promotional giveaways of mirrors, tools and home decorations – including calendars.  Thrifty consumers turned empty five gallon kerosene cans into everything from water buckets to baby carriages, further spreading awareness of the brand – felicitously translated into Chinese as “Meifu” 美孚 (“beautiful and trustworthy”.)  Note how many of these items – lamp, can, etc. – appear in this ad.

II: Patriotism and the “national products” movement

Starting in 1905, however, politics brought some changes to the consumer world, especially in major urban centers such as Shanghai.  That year saw the first major Chinese boycott of foreign goods for political reasons – in this case, a protest against exclusionary immigration policies in the United States.  Significant boycotts against American, Japanese and British goods followed periodically throughout the first four decades of the 20th century.  Some were organized by Chinese business people or overseas Chinese communities, but from the mid-1920s on, the rising Communist and Nationalist parties took an increasingly visible role in the anti-imperialist movement.  A new “national products movement” (guohuo yuandong 國貨運動) urged consumers to buy Chinese, despite the obvious fascination of many wealthy urbanites -- especially Shanghainese -- with all things new and foreign. When the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, founded a national government in Nanjing in 1927, it proclaimed support of the national products movement to be one of its top goals.

III:  The balancing act

The China Petroleum Company was an enterprise run by the Kuomintang government.  Note how its logo is prominently displayed – it closely resembles the Nationalist party emblem seen here. The logo even has a similar name – “White Sun Mark” (bai ri pai) – to the KMT’s, at a time when nearly every man, woman and child in Shanghai would have heard through the KMT propaganda machine that the party symbol was the “white sun in the blue sky.”  So China Petroleum was playing both sides – its kerosene carried the foreign appeal of an American product, but also possessed the patriotic cachet of the revolutionary party.

Chinese companies and marketers continue to face similar challenges today.  Foreign products, particularly luxury goods, carry the cachet of “name brands” (ming pai 名牌).  Yet Chinese manufacturers are eager to establish reputations for quality for their own products, not only for the domestic market but also for international sales.  Products and companies from overseas, including those from Japan and the US, have still been subject to spontaneous or organized boycotts on nationalist grounds, a process that has undergone 21st century permutations through the introduction of internet and new marketing technologies.

References:

Chu-yuan Cheng. “The United States Petroleum Trade with China, 1876-1949.” In America’s China Trade in Historical Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance, edited by Ernest R. May and John K. Fairbank. Cambridge:  Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986.

Sherman Cochran. Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880-1937.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2000.

Karl Gerth. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation.  Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.

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