Nevertheless, there are quite elaborate controls in place governing advertising aimed at children in China. It shouldn't show affluent kids displaying pride in possessing a product while an impoverished counterpart dressed in rags looks on in envy. It shouldn't show children indulging in insulting behavior to the family (or, needless to say, the state). And it shouldn't encourage children to ask their parents to buy the advertised product for them. This last prohibition is surely ambiguous at best. Isn't what it seems to ban the whole point of such advertising?
The good news, however, is that the older generations in China still distrust advertising in general, and that many of the young are coming to take a similar view.
Citizens of this and other emerging Asian economies, however, tend, in my experience, to take a tolerant view of advertising. The reason, I think, is that the products that get advertised most are ones that carry with them the cachet of modernity, frequently foreign imports. By and large you don't get as many advertisements for, say, traditional medicines or restaurants offering noodles as you do for Coca Cola or McDonald's.
Advertisements, therefore, represent the things that are carrying life away from the impoverished, embarrassing existence that was the country's experience just a short time ago, and still prevails in areas outside parts of a few big eastern and southern cities. (The authors point out that in 2000 Beijing, Shanghai and Guandong between them accounted for nearly half the country's TV advertising expenditure).
As for me, I admit to having an old-fashioned attitude to much advertising. I consider many advertisers as fitting Jonathan Swift's famous diatribe against lawyers in Gulliver's Travels, of which the following is representative: "I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves."
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