Abstract
This article analyses the representation and reception of the advertising of children’s healthcare products in Chinese television. It engages with the concept of risk to analyse the representation of a coherent narrative of young children’s health-related risks comprising messages of environment, nature, nutrition and science. Within the narrative, interconnected risks – risks of everyday living, risks of environment pollution, risk of malnutrition – as well as a wider discourse of ‘risk and protection’ are constructed. This article also analyses parents’ reception of the discourse and their responses to perceived and real health risks contextualised in a neoliberal system marked by medicalised children’s healthcare and ‘truncated’ civic rights in China. This article argues that these institutional conditions reinforce the risk-centred narrative which invokes heightened parental uncertainties and anxieties about childrearing as part of the modern cultural experiences in China.
Highlights
China’s unique state-led modernisation project has garnered a great deal of academic interests, but academic research has inadequately addressed modernism in the Chinese context as a ‘cultural experience’ marked by uncertainty, ambiguity, doubt, risk and continual change (Barker, 2012: 185-186; Zinn, 2006)
This paper engages with the concept of risk to analyse the cultural representation of risk in commercial advertising, as well as the complex and dynamic processes of risk perception and management by new parents in China
In this school of thought, modernism is conceived as a cultura1l experience or ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams quoted in Barker, 2012: 185) marked by continual change, risk, and uncertainty
Summary
China’s unique state-led modernisation project has garnered a great deal of academic interests, but academic research has inadequately addressed modernism in the Chinese context as a ‘cultural experience’ marked by uncertainty, ambiguity, doubt, risk and continual change (Barker, 2012: 185-186; Zinn, 2006). This paper engages with the concept of risk to analyse the cultural representation of risk in commercial advertising, as well as the complex and dynamic processes of risk perception and management by new parents in China. It firstly outlines its theoretical approaches and introduces contextual issues – a healthcare system governed by neoliberal rationality and characterised by individualisation and self-care. Cultural studies scholars use ‘modernism’ to refer to the ‘human cultural forms bound up with modernization (Berman quoted in Barker, 2012: 185) In this school of thought, modernism is conceived as a cultura1l experience or ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams quoted in Barker, 2012: 185) marked by continual change, risk, and uncertainty
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