Compromising with Consumerism in Socialist China: Transnational Flows and Internal Tensions in 'Socialist Advertising'

Gerth explores consumerism in socialist China. Recent research on eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has uncovered consumerism thriving behind the Cold War propaganda that has heretofore hidden aspects of everyday life in socialist economies. In line with such scholarship, an examination of the persistence of markets and consumerism in China challenges the still pervasive assumption of western Cold War scholarship that China under Maoism was a realm of pure asceticism without room for any consumer desire after 1949. Exploring the persistence of consumerism thus reveals hidden dimensions of Chinese life in the Mao era while simultaneously examining the transnational flows among socialist countries and between capitalist and socialist economies, flows that, in effect, kept consumerism alive in socialist countries such as China. At the same time, exploring the spectrum of attitudes and policies toward consumerism within such countries--ranging from acceptance or, at the very least, resignation toward consumerism to intense hostility--demonstrates that they could and did vary between countries at any given time and over time in any individual socialist state.