Chinese intimacies & consumer–culture–brand relations

ABSTRACT

Two Western culture-inflected paradigms of intimacy dominate scholarship in the marketing and consumer behaviour disciplines: intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed and intimacy as knowledge-which-accumulates. This article decentres these concepts by exploring how intimacies in China emerge in complex co-created ways, from contextual settings, from the local construction of space and place, through kinship and its extensions, through ritual and embodied everyday practices, and through the situational instantiation of symbolic boundaries which separate the sphere of intimacy from the public and private spheres. The article shows how competing paradigms for intimacy, including the Western culture inflected paradigms, interact across diverse social domains in China, and further, how Chinese persons’ dispositions regards intimacy are shaped by broader processes of globalization. The article draws on autoethnography in China, as well as popular culture, social media, and brand communications analysis. It offers conclusions about how to theorize consumer-culture-brand relationships considering the analyses of intimacy explored throughout.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimacy
• China
• space
• culture
• consumer
• brands

Introduction

Intimacy is a concept of vital importance to marketers (Akçura and Srinivasan 2005). Intimacy also explicitly draws our attention to the social, which marketers routinely overlook with positivist metrics and a methodological focus on consumers as individuals (Arrow 1994).

Two Western culture inflected paradigms of intimacy dominate scholarship in the marketing and consumer behaviour disciplines: intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed, or self-disclosure, and intimacy as knowledge-which-accumulates, i.e. understanding acquired through observation and/or analysis. This article will de-centre these concepts of intimacy by tracing the multivarious organization of intimacy in the context of China’s immense recent social change.

Rather than locate the experience of intimacy in these Western culture inflected paradigms, the author will argue that China exhibits forms of intimacy which are framed and implicitly motivated by indigenous discourses of personhood and subjectivity, which themselves interact with globalizing discourses. Specifically, I will explore how intimacy in China emerges from the immanent self, through kinship and its extensions, through embodied everyday practices, through the cultural construction of space and place, and through the situational instantiation of symbolic boundaries which separate the sphere of intimacy from the public and private spheres.

As the marketing and consumer research literatures see intimacy in particular ways which insufficiently describe China’s reality, this article illuminates aspects of intimacy which will critically inform consumer marketing and brand relationships.

Intimacy in Western cultures

Two concepts of intimacy

In “Western” cultures, intimacy is primarily conceptualized as a kind of relationship which obtains through the opening of your innermost thoughts, feelings, motives, and secrets to another person for the purpose of sharing (Jullien 2015a; Kasulis 2002; Prager 1997). In Latin, “intimus” means either “what is innermost” or “a close friend,” and the verb “intimāre” means “to make known.” Thus, the root meaning of this intimacy is much like “making known to a close friend what is innermost.” This intimacy is achieved by disclosing our hidden and deepest inwardness to another person through the metaphorical “stripping” of superficial affectations and by sharing unflattering self-reflections and past acts which might otherwise be deemed shameful (Masters 2013). Unflattering disclosures can range from small, such as disclosing abilities below your official designation, to significant, such as feeling jealous towards a peer, or having a criminal past, and are offered with the high expectation of reciprocity or reward. People share privately held and potentially devastating secrets in this volitional “stripping” process, but the faith and trust required to disclose these secrets is itself the act of creating intimacy. The risk, vulnerability, or “nakedness” this sharing involves is understood to generate the possibility of infinite depth inside of oneself, which is why this intimacy is so closely linked with romantic love (Aron, Fisher, and Strong 2006; Jullien 2015a; Sternberg 1986). This intimacy is usually achieved with spouses or lovers, but in some cases, it might also be achieved with a close friend or mentor.

Philosopher François Jullien (2015a) searched for intimacy as self-disclosure in Greek antiquity and found nothing similar there. The Greeks did not think about intimacy as Europeans do today. They were far more accepting of physical nakedness, but they did not see the point of sharing their innermost feelings with others. They did not write diaries conveying their personal secrets, for example. The concept of intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed only emerged in Europe with the concept of individuality, which is itself a relativity recent idea (Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 2008). Jullien traces the genesis of this intimacy to the Judeo-Christian tradition of belief in personal commune with God through prayer, specifically around the time Saint Augustine was writing his 4th century AD “confessions” (Jullien 2015a). This intimacy as self-disclosure was consolidated later, as the “civilizing processes” of the Middle Ages incrementally separated mind from body, resulting in the Cartesian dualist sense of self (Elias 2000; Foucault 1978). The Reformation made the capacity for an internal experience of divinity a defining feature of the individual. Later still, Romantic literatures and arts projected the risk, adventure, and vulnerability which a direct relationship with divinity had represented in medieval Europe onto worldly relationships with others (Wu 2012). Intimacy therefore varies across history and culture.

Modern social psychologists have attempted to measure the organization and expression of romantic intimacy across cultures (Dion and Dion 1993). Americans have been shown to perceive “love relationships” to be “more intimate” than “best friend relationships,” while Japanese perceive the contrary (Gudykunst and Nishida 1986). Japanese have shown lower levels of feelings of “attachment,” “belongingness,” and “commitment” toward their spouses or partners than either French or Americans do (Ting-Toomey 1991). Chinese respondents in Hong Kong and Taiwan report lower levels of “affection” than French respondents (Tzeng 1993). “Intimacy” is purportedly no less intense for Chinese couples than for Americans, though “passion” might be (Gao 2001). Unfortunately, all these studies pre-define intimacy in ways which can be conveniently measured and neglect to show how intimacy is organized from native categories of understanding (Seki, Matsumoto, and Todd Imahori 2002).

The above paradigms for intimacy may not necessarily apply to a culture such as China, where subjectivity is understood differently to Western cultures (Jullien 2015a). Social psychologists themselves widely believe China to be place where subjectivity is “interdependently” situated within the social world, rather than apart from it (Markus and Kitayama 1991; Singelis 1994). Cognition and emotion are believed to be “more dialectical” in China versus Western cultures (Bagozzi, Wong, and Yi 1999); positivity and negativity, too (Peng and Nisbett 1999). While Judeo-Christian and Western civilization is founded on the logocentric “Word” (Derrida 1976), explicit verbal meanings are believed to receive less attention in China than nonverbal mutual understandings (Hall 1976). The author is critical of essentialisms treating China and the West as monolithic and opposed cultural entities (Griffiths 2012; Lowe 2002). However, even from within cross-cultural psychology, it is clear that intimacy in Chinese contexts may not be about manifesting the “truth" of a “secret”, spoken from an “interior authority”, or found primarily in the context of “romantic” relationships, at all.

A second notion of intimacy common to Western cultures refers to detailed observational and/or analytical knowledge of another person’s mannerisms and practices which accumulates to a point whereby the objectifying relationship is distinguished as “intimate” (Prager 1997). This observationally acquired understanding (Lobinger et al. 2021) can include the ability to recognize body language, recite voice inflection points, knowledge of bodily aches and pains, and typical movements. It can also include the knowledge of another person’s consumption behaviour, eating, washing, and grooming rituals, and preferences. Persons usually develop this form of intimacy mutually and alongside affective relations, such as when emotionally involved couples come to sub-consciously mimic each other’s characteristics (Aron et al. 1991). However, this kind of intimacy can also persist without emotional attachments, such as in the case of divorced couples who retain “intimate” knowledge of each other’s habits after separation, or accrue in the absence of emotional involvement altogether, such as between long-term co-habiting prison inmates, for example (Harman, Vernon, and Egan 2007).

Intimacy in marketing & consumer culture theory

Marketers typically understand intimacy either as an outcome of close commercial relationships (Akçura and Srinivasan 2005) or as a determinant of customer commitment and loyalty (Yim, Tse, and Chan 2008). Emotional and social ties which bind a customer or consumer to certain brands or service providers are seen to develop due to consistently satisfying product and service experiences (Balaji, Roy, and Wei 2016). Scholarship in this area most often takes the form of structural equation modelling (Bügel, Verhoef, and Buunk 2011; Park et al. 2023). Statistical relationships derived between intimacy and variables such as “service quality,” “customer satisfaction,” or “customer trust” (Chinomona and Sandada 2013) are believed to suggest how businesses might build intimacy through marketing tactics such as customisation or brand loyalty campaigns (Li 2009). Intimacy is typically predefined by reference to interpersonal psychology (Heller and Wood 1998; Sternberg 1986), or as a function of a related concept such as “trust” (Liu, Guo, and Lee 2011). Little consideration is given to the diverse possible meanings of intimacy or the complex contextualized socio-cultural processes by which intimate relationships are generated.

If we look specifically at literature on consumer–brand relationships (CBR), which is “multi-disciplinary, with a variety of theories, concepts, and constructs borrowed from different fields” (Fetscherin and Heilmann 2015, 367), we see that such relationships take many forms: “brand love,” “brand hate,” “brand friendships,” “brand trust,” etc. (Alvarez, David, and George 2023). Still, most studies here employ quantitative measures to consumer responses to questions about variables such as “emotional commitment” and “brand personality” (Becheur, Bayarassou, and Ghrib 2017; Nobre, Becker, and Brito 2010), and conceive of intimacy as just one of several aspects of brand relationship quality as per psychologist Sternberg’s “triangular theory of love” (1986). For example, a foundational study argues that intimacy understood as a function of personal “risk” and vulnerability, i.e. much like interior-secrets-revealed, along with “credibility,” “is an essential component of trust” (Blackston 1993, 113–124). The same study argues that brand relationships are expressed by the formula Trust = 1/Risk x Credibility x Intimacy (Blackston 1993, 113–124). There exists comparatively little marketing scholarship which reflexively and qualitatively interprets the socially constructed meaning of intimacy (Price and Arnould 1999). Still less on intimacy in manifold markets and cultures (Abidin and Thompson 2012).

A close examination of the literature, moreover, reveals that marketers consistently think of intimacy only in terms of a close relationship between customers and service providers based on high levels of self-disclosure and mutual understanding, i.e. in terms of interior-secrets-revealed and knowledge-which-accumulates. To give a significant, though far from exhaustive flavour of this, a study of customer loyalty argues that, when the “new agenda of customer intimacy [is] to make customers feel good whenever they make contact with your company,” intimacy means “knowledge that accumulates” (Yim, Tse, and Chan 2008, 742). A cross-selling study holds that where intimacy with customers is the objective, intimacy “emerges from detailed information on customer demographics and preferences” (Akçura and Srinivasan 2005). An online content strategy study asserts that communication is one of five key principles comprising customer intimacy, and “As long as the user is willing to disclose their personal information, contents [can] generate intimate experience” (Ting-Peng, Li, and Turban 2009, 3). A study of human resource metrics proposes a range of conditions to improve customer intimacy including hiring employees who “constantly seek customer intelligence” and “share ‘secrets’ easily and readily with co-workers” (Beatty, Huseld, and Schneier 2003, 112). In a similar vein, an ethnographic study of intimacy in luxury retail emphasizes the importance of foregrounding “the accumulation of knowledge” about customers and the “sharing of gifts and secrets” in commercial friendship between salespersons and customers (Welté, Cayla, and Cova 2022, 657). The same study notes the asymmetric power dynamic between luxury salespersons and customers which is “shown by entering the innermost” (Welté, Cayla, and Cova 2022, 657). Clearly, marketing scholars think of intimacy in terms of interior-secrets-revealed and knowledge-which-accumulates.

If we look to Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) (Arnould and Thompson 2005), which explicitly intends to transcend the constraints of the empiricist-positivist scientific tradition, we find a fundamentally similar though conceptually more sophisticated pattern. Susan Fournier’s seminal study of consumer–brand relationships (1998) maintains that consumers form “intimate relationships with brands” through “elaborate knowledge structures” expressed in their “stories” (Fournier 1998, 365), i.e. as per both interior-secrets-revealed and knowledge-which-accumulates. Bengtsson (2003, 156–157) has countered Fournier, arguing that while intimacy between human partners “concerns the exclusive sharing of our most personal information,” this sharing is not obviously possible between persons and brands. Rather, Bengtsson argues, “intimate knowledge” of objects makes them become “extended parts of ourselves” (cf. Belk 1988, 150). Such “intimate knowledge,” moreover, can be socially extended via person-thing-person relationships (Bengtsson 2003, 156–157). In this triangular way, Ahuvia similarly argues that consumers’ “passion for consumption connects us and makes us who we are” (2022). Thus, while all these studies advance CCT, these studies also assume that interior-secrets-revealed and knowledge-which-accumulates are the only ways to conceptualize intimacy. Where addressed explicitly, moreover, intimacy is still conceived only as just one of several aspects of brand relationship quality (Fournier 1998, 366). The author will argue that if marketers are to theorize consumer–brand relationships in China, intimacy may need to be conceptualized differently.

Practiced familiarity & scientific paradigms

A third notion of intimacy, less understood outside of the human sciences, might aid an analysis of intimacy in the Chinese context. This refers to the routine-familiarity-of-practice. This intimacy differs from knowledge-which-accumulates through objectification and analysis since it accrues only through extended practical learning. This is the intimacy which we say applies when someone has acquired “intimate” knowledge of an instrument or technology. This intimacy is also the supra-individual modus operandi which unconsciously structures social action and helps actors identify and integrate in-group members across diverse fields of interaction, as per Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (1977; cf. Zhang 2020). Intimacy here is less an instrumental goal achieved than the basis for experience and interaction (Tuan and Hoelscher 1977). It is the “affective-becoming conative force” by which feelings and experience “extend” into the phenomenological world (Robinson 2013).

Consumer Culture Theorists have already shown how the routine-familiarity-of-practice is integral to consumption. Consumers’ practices have been shown to conform to social rather than individual patterns (Holt 1997; see also Thompson and Hirschman 1995). Similarly, a study of wedding rituals in the context of Vietnam’s transition to a market society showed consumption to be shaped by local “harmonizing processes of socio-cultural normativity” (Nguyen and Belk 2013, 1). Susan Fournier’s seminal study of consumer–brand relationships, again, notes that relationships “inextricably woven into the fabric of daily life can endure despite low levels of affective involvement and intimacy” (Fournier 1998, 364–365). A study of the value of intimacy in relation to economic rationality in small tourism and hospitality businesses describes the “complex social reality” by which “intimacy as a commercial value emerges” from “tension between a ‘commercial home’ and a ‘home’, or between ‘service with a personal touch’ and ‘friendship’.” i.e. through situational “boundaries” by which “closeness” and “distance” are negotiated (Cederholm and Holtman 2010, 16, and 24-25). These latter studies highlight the need to analyse how the meanings of intimacy in consumption are locally organized and arise in co-created ways, from contextual settings, from the construction of space and place, from ritual and embodied everyday practices, and through situational boundaries which delimit the sphere of intimacy from the public and private spheres (cf. Lamont and Molnar 2002).

The author of this research article has leveraged theory related to the routine-familiarity-of-practice (e.g. Bourdieu’s idea of “habitus,” 1977) to chart a “third” methodological way between subjectivism and objectivism in the instantiation of individuality in China – a country where cross-cultural social psychologists often erroneously suppose individuals do not exist (Griffiths 2012). In this article, the author asks how the meanings and experience of intimacy in China differ from the dominant Western paradigms for intimacy, and how these differences might inform consumer marketing and consumer–brand relationships.

Philosopher Thomas P. Kasulis offers a relevant point of departure (2002). For Kasulis, intimacy is a worldview directly opposed to empiricist-positivist science. Science emphasizes integrity, i.e. objectivity as public verifiability, external over internal relations, knowledge as ideally empty of affect, the intellectual and psychological as opposed to the somatic, and knowledge as reflective and self-conscious of its own grounds. Intimacy is objective, but personal rather than public, internal to a relationship rather than external, affective, embodied as well as psychological, and not generally self-conscious, reflective, or self-illuminating (Kasulis 2002, 24). Since marketing discourse presupposes a view of intimacy shaped by positivism, Kasulis’ inspiration exhorts consumer marketing scholarship to interpret the local social construction of intimacy and its role in consumption relationships in diverse cultures.

In the remainder of this article, the first section outlines the author's research methodology. The second section situates the organization and expression of intimacy in China in historical and contemporary context. This anthropological “detour” is necessary for cultural analysis and frames the analyses to follow. The third section is empirical and shows how competing paradigms for intimacy interact across diverse social domains in Chinese society. The author’s purpose here is to further show how dispositions regarding intimacy which ultimately impact upon consumer marketing and consumer–brand relationships are embedded within and arise from non-commercial everyday interactions and socio-cultural discourse. The fourth section translates the entire foregoing analysis into brand communications, social media, and popular culture analysis. The concluding discussion informs theory-building in consumer–brand relationships.

Research methodology

My initial engagement with China as an English teacher, 2000-2002, morphed into a period of formal language training and empirical fieldwork in China during my master’s degree in Chinese Studies, 2004-2005, then into an extended period of intensive training in cultural analysis and ethnography for my PhD between 2005 and 2010. I conducted observant participation across a wide spectrum of society in Anshan, a “third tier” city in China’s Liaoning Province, for approximately 5–6 months per year, every year, gathering data from informants as diverse as consumerist youths, disgruntled intellectuals, enterprising farmers, retired Party cadres, the rural migrant staff of an inner-city restaurant, the urban employees of a privately-owned machine-repair workshop and their families, and range of white-collar professionals. As well as observational and participatory data, I also conducted in-depth interviews, yielding many hundreds of pages of notes and transcripts. These data sources were analysed hermeneutically (Thompson 1997), treated as a synchronic system, and disaggregated into their most reducible interpretive categories, initially with the aid of a qualitative data management system.

My analytical focus was on the “symbolic boundaries” describing how persons positioned themselves through judgements of “purity,” “taste,” and “worthiness” most broadly construed (Lamont and Molnar 2002). I employed a “critical discourse analysis” (Fairclough 1995) to each of my disaggregated categories, investigating each of these in terms of their “internal” and situationally inflected logics. A second stage of analysis then juxtaposed the “consumption, or use” (de Certeau 1984, 29–42) which individual informants had made of these categories across diverse “fields” of practice. Inspired by social theory, where acts of individuation are seen not only as expressions of individual agency but also as expressions of ontologically prior discourses legitimating local cultural practice (Bourdieu 1977; 1984 [1979]), I sought to identify the “grammar” structuring how my informants “bricolaged” individual identities from shared cultural resources, as well as how these processes in turn gave structure to society (Griffiths 2012).

This research article represents an evolution of the emergent parts of my research concerning “intimacy” and “civility” (Griffiths 2012, 59–94). With reflection and further scholarly reading, I came to realize that my efforts to map the intersubjective contours of personhood in Chinese society from first analytical principles were entirely about “intimacy,” and moreover, that my reflexive ethnographic approach raised the question of how it was and indeed is possible for me to have intimate relationships across very different cultures. The arguments presented below here therefore represent less the result of a research design than the result of an evolution in my key research question.

Insertion of my subjectivity and agency as researcher directly into Chinese society allows me to examine the cultural co-creation of intimacy more closely than other methods (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017). I have always understood that being a foreign, “white,” and (initially) unmarried male, is a significant incitement to discourse in China, and one which provokes a particular set of meanings and power relations. However, since marrying a Chinese woman in 2008, I found that my committed relationship means I am inducted into familial networks, and readily introduced to relatives, neighbours, and friends. Most people I encounter in China perceive that I urgently need to be informed, so interact with me candidly, at least in private conversation. Over time, I have learned to balance my real ignorance with an affected ignorance, my intense interest with a cultivated disinterest, and make my ambiguous position as a “foreign family member” suit the demands of research quite well.

From 2010 onwards, I commercialized my expertise at global advertising and market research consultancy groups in Shanghai. I became involved in a wide array of qualitative research, cultural intelligence, and brand development projects, and arrived at insights across these. I also made observations in my personal life and developed reflections on these, which I took back to scholarly reading together with all the above information as my interest in intimacy developed (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017). Accordingly, this research article synthesizes data systematically gathered from Anshan, insights developed from my commercial work, plus more casual observations from everyday life, popular media analyses, and online searches, into a single “thick description” (Geertz 1975).

As the arguments presented below crystallized in my thinking, I considered initiating further primary research on consumers” “intimate” relationships with brands. However, I ultimately rejected this approach, not least because primary research is more problematic in present-day China, but also because direct questioning would not elicit the underlying “implicit” script which was emerging through my indirect behavioural and cultural analyses. Rather than approach a pre-defined object directly, I intended to de-centre “intimacy” by taking a detour as is necessary for anthropological analysis, departing from it and re-approaching from another angle (Desjeux 2019).

The resultant analysis represents part of my personal journey through cultural difference, assimilation, and acculturation of an ongoing and perpetual sort. For these latter reasons also, this research article maintains “the West” as an indexical counterpoint to China, as opposed to, say Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East and interpretations of intimacy there. Far from reproducing “neo-colonial” hierarchies of knowledge, for a British ethnographer resident in China, with a local family, speaking and reading Chinese language, the “West” is simply the same “West” (西方) which comprises China’s primary sense of Otherness in everyday socio-cultural discourse (Iqani 2014, 4).

Intimacy in Chinese cultures

This section of the article situates the organization and expression of intimacy in China in historical and contemporary context, setting up the argument that China exhibits multiple and conflicting forms of intimacy shaped by processes of macro-societal change and globalization.

Immanent self & relational society

Chinese philosophy of antiquity exhibits little emphasis on individuality as an interior world populated with mental objects and no preoccupation with how to bridge the subjective and objective worlds (Hansen 1995). The Chinese conceived of subjectivity only as immanent in social action (Jullien 2015a). Actions were understood to be guided by a person’s “heart-mind” (心), i.e. a sort of interpersonal emotional radar or moral compass, but interior mental states were not seen as the primary basis for volition or cause of action (Hansen 1995). The concept of “personhood” (人) corresponded to a relatively fixed social position or set of role responsibilities, not to individuality per se, and was achieved by modifying behaviour to maintain equilibrium with others (Hsu 1971). Confucian ideology held that by cultivating the socially-situated person and observing strict rules of propriety which reproduced hierarchical asymmetries within the family, between the genders, and viz Imperial authority, the country and cosmos would be perfectly harmonious (Sun 2013). Alternative ideas of personhood as a form of universal interior authority, and related ideas of self-discovery and enlightenment, were manifest in Taoist philosophy, Ch’an Buddhism, marginal religious cults, and peripheral remarks Confucius made about the impact of music. However, these ideas were regarded with fear and suspicion by China’s legalist central authorities, and taboo, since they interfered with The Emperor’s efforts to govern by disrupting the primordial energetic balance between Yin and Yang (Feuchtwang 2012).

In this context “intimacy” was implicit in the very fabric of psycho-social organization (Seok 2021). Rather than any ultimate moral obligations to a God-like celestial power or formal obligations to society at large, Chinese persons held obligations according to a sliding scale of psycho-social network density (Hsu 1971). Social structure consisted in persons, their families (clans), and networks of overlapping mutual interest which authorized persons in exchange for loyalty (Fei, Hamilton, and Wang 1992). First order social obligations came to spouses and immediate family members, where the private sphere was designated, and where persons were expected to be unquestioningly devoted and committed to each other (Liu 2006). Where intimacy existed alongside obligation, it was understood as a given, as can clearly be seen in the Chinese words for “intimacy” or “intimate” still today, both of which combine ideographs meaning “family” or “kinship” with others meaning “density” or “near” (亲密, 亲近). Second order social obligations came to extended family and clan members, and saw “intimacy” experienced as a situational extension of and transformation from the private sphere, as can be seen in another Chinese word for “intimate” today, which combines ideographs for “family” and “friend” (亲友). Third order social obligations came to wider interpersonal ties, with rapidly decreasing priority given to distant others. Strangers came last of all in this relational psycho-social schema, and in such a context a given action could at once be both a private virtue and a public vice (Luo 2023).

Horizontal and flexible distances between persons interacted with the vertical, firm, and hierarchical order of society through rituals of reciprocal gift exchange or guanxi (Gold, Guthrie, and Wank 2002). As in China today, guanxi (关系) practices could be personal or impersonal (Yang 1994) and differed between friends and strangers, as well as between urban and rural persons (Yan 1996a). Guanxi practices often involved using known persons to influence unknown persons to achieve a purpose, so the relation did not strictly need to be intimate. Unlike similarly impersonal and politicized social dealings in Western cultures, however, where intimacy is not at all synonymous with affectation, cordiality, hospitality, graciousness, or magnanimity (all these are civility), guanxi interactions were typically performed with affective character. Situational ethics (人情) allowed Chinese to behave as if rapport with their distant contacts was as genuine as concern for immediate family members, without being seen as inauthentic or impractical (Kipnis 1997, 8–9, 105-115). The degree of intimacy was not something that necessarily inhered in the gift exchanged, either – it depended on the occasion, the recipient, and how obligatory gifts and counter-gifts were understood to be (Joy 2001).

Since at least the early Ming-dynasty, consumption was integral to these guanxi practices, even though capitalism was still nascent and repressed (Hamilton and Lai 1989). Material goods and symbols were the currency for exchange, and for marking and maintaining social status, much as in China today (Eckhardt and Bengtsson 2009; Wong and Ahuvia 1998). However, from the late Qin dynasty through to the late Ming (Chen 2019; Clunas 1991), sumptuary laws regulated consumption in ways which prefigured the stringent controls during China’s twentieth-century Maoist period (see also below) and anti-corruption laws on gift exchange today.

For millennia, the concept of intimacy as social density was implicit in the way that physical space was organized into social space and place (Tuan and Hoelscher 1977). Still today, the modern Chinese language has one and the same single ideograph for the concepts “home” and “family” (家). Urban people commonly lived in cramped rows of single-storey housing, often along waterways (Knapp and Lo 2005). Water and waste facilities were shared between many families. Agricultural households had more space, but in another sense were more intimate as they formed lineage-based communities of descendants from the same ancestral patriarch (Yan 1996b). Elite and well-to-do families, notably in Peking (now known as Beijing), lived in communal homes organized around a central courtyard (Bray 2005). Different family units lived in each building, but the residents would often be the offspring of a single patriarch with multiple wives. Unmarried daughters were consigned to the most secluded parts of the home, along with servants due to their lower status, to protect their virginity as required for patrilineal purity (Hong, Joe, and Dong San 1993). Married women became the property of their husband’s family and were often unable to retain relations with their maternal families.

As in much of the pre-modern world, intimacy within marriage was understood in the context of role-responsibility (Yan 2003). Spouses were chosen by parents and the purpose of sex was pro-creation, to extend the lineage. Sexual intimacy was accorded “low priority” between spouses (Luo and Yu 2022, 296). Adultery was considered a serious crime for women (Zhou 1989), though men were allowed to have concubines and engage in commercial sex (Yu, Luo, and Xie 2022, 295). Personality was organized primarily around expressing situationally-appropriate feelings, not “inner” feelings or desires (Hansen 1995; Lu 2013). Intense “emotion” (情) (Eifring 2004) and acts of passion between lovers would have been genuine enough, but spontaneous expressions of intimacy would not have been as verbal or explicit as in many cultures today (Potter 1988; Yan 1996b, 139–145). Close partnership between persons did not require revealing unflattering secrets, but neither was a volitional stripping process necessary to build faith and trust. On the contrary, faith and trust were built around performing social roles and keeping secrets for the sake of social and moral integrity.

The idea of celebrating sensuality, pleasure, and sex for its own sake was repressed in public discourse (Yu, Luo, and Xie 2022, 294). Chinese literature of the Middle Ages demonstrates few intense declarations of love, bold expressions of sexual desire, or professions of all-consuming grief at separation. The Tang dynasty folktale, “Butterfly Lovers,” tells of passion and devotion but also of repressed sensuality, repressed femininity, conflict between personal desires and familial obligations, and of suffering and self-sacrifice – for the lovers can be together only in suicide (Denton 2004). The Ming-dynasty novel, “The Plum in the Golden Vase,” historically outlawed for its “pornographic” metaphors, offers little to resemble intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed (Roy 1997).

It was not until the eighteenth century that Chinese interpretations of intimacy began to change. Sinologist Francois Jullien (2015a) identifies a transient stage in the evolution of intimacy in China in mid-Qing dynasty auto-biographer Shen Fu’s deeply personal and strikingly open accounts of devotion to his wife. Shen Fu, however, documents the trivia of his love-life in much the same way as he “intimately” describes his flower gardens, cultural artefacts, and material objects. He evinces no risk or adventure in his interactions with his wife and draws no strength from them. There is no purpose, end, commitment, or cause to his tenderness, and he is not motivated by the hope that romantic intimacy typically triggers in modern cultures. Shen Fu’s “intimacy” is thus closer to knowledge-which-accumulates and can be distinguished from interior-secrets-revealed.

Interior self & public sphere

China’s interactions with colonial powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries changed the cultural organization of personhood and intimacy forever. The advent of industrial modernity and the introduction of new forms of instrumental knowledge such as economics and hygiene divorced privacy from the intimate sphere and instituted a clearer sense of individuality than China had ever seen. In the 1920s and 1930s, hygienic rationality was successfully applied to domains as diverse as personal care, foreign policy, and urban planning, in ways which ran counter to Confucian civilization. Along with Western dress, education, new concern for law and administration, participation in the new civic order and respect for women’s rights, hygiene became a hierarchical marker of the “gentleman” who intended to advance the Darwinian cause of progress and national competition in terms which nevertheless remained distinctly Chinese (Rogaski 2004). Western branded goods symbolized this new modernity, as did Western films, Western sports (e.g. golf), pets, hairstyles, fashions, music, and more (Cochran 2006; Gerth 2003).

China evinced a nationalist consumer counterculture during this period, too (Dikötter 2012). Historians have shown how consumerism impacted hugely on the cultural orientation of “treaty port” cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou in the early twentieth century, where domestic consumer-goods brands were used to rally nationalist sentiments vis-ä-vis “foreign” brands and political loyalty translated into “identity markers” which resonated with the growing middle classes, in ways also observed today (Cochran 1999; Lee 2000; Zhao and Belk 2008a).

In the 1920s and 1930s too, the new Republic’s emphasis on national production saw a sexualisation of the body instituted and the naturalization of sexual desire. Some Chinese, mainly women, engaged foreigners in cross-cultural love affairs. Educated elites expressed anxieties over prostitution, venereal diseases, birth control, and sexualities, and published confessions to daily newspapers, and made inquiries about sexual intimacy to medical journals (Dikotter 1995). Translations of Western Romantic novels were introduced and the discourse of “romantic love” (爱) captured the imagination of young intellectuals as an antidote to a tradition which had, in their view, repressed love and desire. Literary couples wrote letters to each other documenting the intimate details of their secret love affairs, their bodies, domestic lives, and their frustrations with social and cultural normativity (McDougall 2002). Parallel developments in literature and the arts fused the public revelation of interior feelings and secrets with searing satires of China’s crumbling Confucian institutions, and briefly, announced a fledgling public sphere.

Collectivism as enforced paradigm

The Communist Revolution of 1949 saw China’s leadership denounce the hierarchical principles of Confucian and capitalist social organization and assert a rather forced “intimacy” over the population in the name of egalitarianism, public subservience, and comradeship. Maoist collectives were not “unnatural” versus a capitalist and individualist way of life; rather, Chinese people had no choice but to cooperate. Central government planners micro-managed the economy so that people’s needs were largely stipulated for them by the state. Landowners and entrepreneurs were relieved of their property. Intellectuals and dissidents were neutralized. Farmers were herded into cramped communes, made to work to government targets. Urban citizens were allocated apartments in state-owned residential concrete blocks with as many as eight family members (Walder 1986). The Great Leap Forward, Mao’s attempt to overtake “Imperialist” powers, collapsed into epic tragedy (Li and Yang 2005). The Cultural Revolution, Mao’s personality cult launched versus “impure” Party factions (Kraus 1977; Walder 2015), saw China descend into street battles and “intimate treacheries” (Branigan 2023, 1) as family members turned on one another. Individuality became anathema, and “redness” the only social and moral category of significance.

Manipulation of status hierarchies in the pursuit of social esteem was very much alive during the Maoist period so long as manipulations conformed to categories ascribed by the state. “Rural” versus “urban,” “worker” versus “cadre,” seniority in the Party (i.e. year of “joining the revolution”), rank in the salary system, which “tier” of city one lived in, and so on, were all legitimately distinctive in explicit or inexplicit ways (Whyte 1975). Social and symbolic capital were traded by recourse to the underground markets and elaborate networks of personal relationships necessary to negotiate the state bureaucracy too. The ability to bend the reality of “the system” to the favour of your patron, thus making your own career steps seem like sacrifices for the common good, was especially highly distinguishing (Yang 1994). Material inequalities existed under Mao, too, even though this was explicitly against official discourse. Senior cadres enjoyed “distinctive lifestyles” (Davis 2000, 3) behind closed Party compound doors and the political power implied by access to consumer brands such as Panda Cigarettes or Moutai (a distilled wine) was widely recognized. Since Socialism was an essentially “scientific” experiment which depended in some large measure on the intellectual elite, even the outlawed “class” distinction was leveraged to suit lurching shifts in state policy (Andreas 2002; Konrád and Szelényi 1979). For the majority of China’s population, however, upwards social mobility and consumption as a project of individuality were reduced to a “bare minimum” (Dirlik 2001, 4).

Maoist puritanism meant that boundaries describing sexual forms of intimacy were very high (Farquhar 2002; Farrer 2002). Concubinage, arranged marriages, and prostitution were outlawed. Novels, movies, and other “bourgeois” forms of literature or art related to love and sexuality were destroyed (Higgins, Zheng, and Liu 2002). Women’s sexual attractiveness was condemned as “depravity” because Mao intended to erase gender as a construct (Yu, Luo, and Xie 2022, 295). Urban persons were allocated to a work-unit (danwei), which in many ways replaced the traditional Confucian family as the locus of administration and control over individuals. The work-unit was responsible for the provision of clothing, food, and accommodation, as well as the issuing of marriage, childbirth, and divorce permissions, therefore sexual intimacy (Wang 2022). Genders were segregated in public. Public expressions of intimacy such as hugging or kissing were considered unethical (Yinhe 1998). If a man even talked to a girl or held her hand this was understood to indicate an intention to marry.

Maoist collectivism, however, also meant that boundaries demarcating non-sexual intimacy were very low and porous. Many forms of non-sexual intimacy were enacted within the public sphere (Yan 2003). Urban workers ate together with colleagues and family and washed in public communal baths separated by gender (Walder 1986). People did not distinguish much between dressing and grooming for public and home. Rural families who could not afford to build an additional home when their son got married would internally divide off part of the patriarch’s home with a curtain (Knapp and Lo 2005). People would leave doors unlocked and often entered neighbour’s homes in their absence.

The “open-door” era

With China’s “economic reforms and opening” in the 1980s and 1990s, ideology describing the situation of persons within society shifted once again. The state retained control over political discourse and retreated from public welfare whilst embracing markets, international trade, and private ownership. Double-digit economic growth was achieved year-on-year and material standards improved greatly (Ikels 1996). Social inequality widened and stratification took on new forms (Zhou 2005). The reintroduction of consumerism emphasized symbolic and status distinctions in ways not seen since Republic times (Davis 2005; Zhang 2020). Increasingly rich cultures were fostered around brands (J. Wang 2008). By the late 1990s, Chinese began to exercise personal choice in most areas of life, and society began to manifest forms of intimacy unthinkable under Mao (Yan 2009). Love and sex were delinked from premarital intimacy, and sexual intimacy became generally more expressive (Jankowiak 1993). Valentine’s Day was imported and saying “I love you” became expected between couples, not an oddity. By the early 2000s, heterosexual couples could be seen kissing in public, and by the late 2000s, China had a vibrant if not exactly open LGBTQ culture. The public consumption of sexual intimacy proliferated too, in the form of sex shops, sexual imagery in advertising, male impotency products, and illegal though highly accessible prostitution (Farrer 2002).

In other ways, however, China’s economic reforms promoted less intimate, more anonymous, and more personalized modes of living (Ma 2006). In preparation for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, many intricate systems of lanes and alleyways which once channelled intimacy as spatial and social density across neighbourhoods and within communities were razed and replaced with commercial imitations. Across the country, property developers constructed privately-owned residential towers and gated communities (Pow 2007). Households which once comprised three or four generations now comprised only one or two. Assailed as “bourgeois” under Mao, hygiene re-entered China’s imagination too, and became a marker of “middle class” distinction versus sectors representing agricultural collectives and socialist industry (Krajewski 2009; Lei 2003). Hygiene was just one way that values and categories ascribed by the state administration gave way to categories structured by private capital, commodity ownership, behavioural trends, commercial communications, and state-led propaganda messaging (Griffiths and Zeuthen 2014; Hong, Joe, and Dong San 1993; Zhao and Belk 2008b; see discussion of “civility” below).

China still exhibits forms of intimacy which have become rare in more industrialized countries. Particularly in rural areas, matchmakers are still involved in semi-arranged marriages, although law has long since determined that couples must meet in person before marriage (Jacka, Kipnis, and Sargeso 2013). Family members develop profound intimacies across generations by taking care of their grandchildren while the parents work, or by taking care of the elderly. China also exhibits forms of intimacy unfamiliar to Western cultures. Anecdotally, teachers at China’s boarding schools for infants and toddlers develop greater intimacy with the children than the parents do. Until homophobia recently emerged in response to the surfacing of gay culture (which was absolutely repressed in Maoist China), foreign visitors were surprised to find that heterosexual male same-sex friends might sometimes hold hands in public (Hird 2009).

Lately, intimacy has become a culturally and politically contested space. In 2014, teenagers at a Sichuan school were told that males and females must not venture within 20 in. of each other in a bid to stamp out “intimacy” at school. Students in Suzhou were ejected from a bus by a driver who objected to a physical display of “affection,” prompting a public outcry which forced the bus driver to resign from his job. More generally, China’s youth have grasped intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed and projected this at large through social media. Despite the state’s attempts to police internet for intimacy, youths avidly blog about personal issues, socialize with strangers, search for lovers online, and share erotic images and stories, using their own names, anonymously, or through aliases or avatars (Jacka, Kipnis, and Sargeso 2013; Yu 2007).

The outbreak of COVID-19 brought intimacy into stark contrast with hygiene, public safety, and transparency. In 2020, Chinese New Year rituals were cancelled, and people stayed at home. Cities were locked down. Once venturing out became possible again, masks and social distancing were mandatory, briefly forcing a revaluation of interaction norms. Even more briefly, protests over “Zero-COVID” in 2022, the total lockdown of cities and related infringements to civil liberties, especially in Shanghai, saw an intense re-awakening of public sphere.

Chinese society today manifests conflicting paradigms for intimacy. Residual forms can still be seen in tropes of comradeship and the propaganda by which the State equates citizenship with patriotism; in the self-interestedness of competing smaller groups within larger organizations; in the calculated affectivity characteristic of guanxi practices; in tropes of devotion and loyalty in popular entertainment; and in the “uncivil” ways some persons of a “post-revolutionary” or “post-socialist” disposition act and interact in public spaces (see below). Forms of intimacy which prioritize a more “modern,” distinct, more instrumental self, and intimacy as revelation from interior authority, are increasingly prevalent, however; these forms are accompanied by privacy, hygiene, romantic adventure, and a deference to “civilised” public order (cf. Yan 2009). Finally, emergent forms of intimacy are increasingly divorced from physical space and see digital social media present new frontiers for socialization, privacy, and power.

In the analyses which follow, I will show how these conflicting forms of intimacy dynamically interact in daily life across diverse domains. My purpose is to show how dispositions which ultimately impact consumer marketing and brand relationships (see analyses still further below) are embedded within and arise from non-commercial everyday interactions and discourse.

Intimate stranger: foreigner in the field

Encountering intimacy in public space

An icon of socialist productivity under Mao and a “rustbelt” city since Deng Xiaoping jettisoned Communism as an economic strategy, Anshan had already begun to manifest the beginnings of a private sector and consumer culture by the time I first arrived there in 2005. Relative to China’s larger and much faster-growing mega-cities, I found Anshan characterized by depression and inequality resulting from the restructuring of the city’s state-owned enterprises in the late 90s (Giles, Park, and Cai 2006). The city had an urban culture anchored in the fading institutions of its socialist past (Hung and Chiu 2003). People shared a fondness for locally-specific relations, memories, and mutual attachments to places and symbols, in ways which “rooted” them together, despite also sharing feelings of collective loss or grief (Bach 2002; Hanser 2008, 15; Hung and Chiu 2003).

My family lived in a Soviet-style block facing other such blocks, organized around a small police depot. Socialist mantras were daubed on the walls in huge characters. Former Party General Secretary Hu Jintao’s “8 Honours and 8 Shames” doctrine was dignified with a poster. Rather incongruously, virtually every home had security bars welded over the windows to prevent burglars climbing into homes, all the way up to the seventh floor. Rubbish piled up and festered in the street.

I was privately shocked at the dirt and disarray in communal areas around the home. I had visited Chinese homes as an “honoured guest” before, but I saw things differently now that I was aligned with the “intimate” sphere. The impression of poverty and disorder did not apply to the home interior at all, which was clean, spacious, and modern-looking. It was not until later that I realized communal areas were not thought to reflect on the owners of private homes (Dürr 2010). In these early moments too, I also observed how neighbours would make use of every available communal space – the stairwells, yards, and other public areas – to store privately-owned sofas, bicycles, and other household objects, which evidently caused low-intensity social friction. The private home ownership market had only been introduced a decade or so earlier, and people were still working out the implications.

Similar signs led me to speculate that certain people exhibited low and porous spatial boundaries. Public parks and squares were immaculately maintained by garbage sweeping teams and represented in idealised form on propaganda posters. It was not uncommon, however, to encounter someone urinating into a corner in these public spaces. Parks and squares reflected on the image of the city and nation, so their upkeep was considered socially important – a kind of public “face” (面子). Corners and lanes were not considered important, so could be used for private convenience. (I should note here that habits in these regards have improved greatly in recent years – see the discussion of “civility” below.)

Walking around downtown urban areas, I observed how people of a post-socialist “proletarian worker” disposition (Hung and Chiu 2003) washed clothes, prepared food, cooked, argued, scolded children, even bathed and slept, in vaguely delimited spaces in the streets outside their homes, while entirely ignoring or not anticipating any public gaze. Persons of a similar demographic seemed to navigate public space as if without any sense of comportment, oblivious of the trajectories of those moving around them. Some would cough and sneeze without at all attempting to divert the impact. Others spat or blew mucous from the nasal cavity directly onto the street (Krajewski 2009). From my own inherited cultural perspective, these latter behaviours appeared anti-social or rude and I struggled to resist the impulse to judge.

Dispositions in these bodily regards clearly differed across my informants. “They just don’t know,” explained a luxury health club customer, noticing my annoyance with several changing room assistants who were apparently unaware that I might prefer to shower and towel away from their immediate gaze. This latter remark seemed intended to note a form of cultural parity between the customer and myself. Later, however, I observed this same man, make full-frontal naked greetings and touch his friends, quite without any discernible discomfort or homophobia. I interpreted these forms communication as acting out a sense of intimacy. Not at all like the privacy-seeking economy of motion which characterizes male public changing room practices in Britain, and not at all like the aggressive posturing which can also characterize the exposure of male bodies in Western cultures. These practices demonstrated a concept of intimacy which was not obviously coterminous with either privacy or interior-secrets-revealed, but was rather embedded in physical space, centred on the body, and emergent from social interaction.

The above findings already suggest implications for theorizing culture, consumer, and brand relationships. If intimacy with customers is an a priori goal of marketing (Akçura and Srinivasan 2005), drawing at least some Chinese consumers into relationships with brands might be less about intimacy as Western marketers commonly understand it, but rather about shared origins (cf. Hung and Chiu 2003), spatial embedding (cf. Tuan and Hoelscher 1977), familiarity (cf. Fei, Hamilton, and Wang 1992; Knapp and Lo 2005; Yan 2003), the body, and social interactions (cf. Hsu 1971). Other consumers, we might infer, may expect the intimate sphere to be more closed, secret, private and out of sight, and for them different approaches may be required.

Boundary management experiences

For many persons I have interacted with this last twenty-five years in China, the notion of a hygienic “cordon sanitaire” demarcating private individual space from the intimate and public spheres remains unfamiliar. While eating with the family, for example, it is conventional to eat from the same dishes using chopsticks, not from a single plate designated for personal use. It is also conventional, indeed a sign of intimacy, to select food for others using one’s chopsticks – which strictly speaking is unhygienic. A comparable gesture in my native British culture would be feeding another with a fork, which is certainly intimacy, but reserved for lovers and parent–child relations, not sons-in-law. The offering of food is highly symbolic in China generally (Farquhar 2002). Fruit is offered when visitors are temporarily inducted into the intimate sphere of a home. Office workers hand out snacks upon return from holiday and colleagues should accept to avoid offense. My occasional failure to perform these rituals on account of privately-felt hygiene concerns or simply not wanting to eat has resulted in charges of pedantry, pretentiousness, and selfishness. In these ways, my hosts in China have exploited my investment in hygienic civility to exclude me from intimacy.

At other times, my hosts have made a “civil transgression” in my presence as a way of consolidating my belonging to the intimate sphere. For example, after meeting my wife’s (now deceased) grandfather for the first time, I was assured that the grandmother had instructed him to hold his wind while I was in their home. I was led to understand what a privilege it was, that this man who “Once held a senior position under Mao, had altered his behaviour for me, then changed it back again once he felt I belonged.” In contrast to middle-class households in Western societies, therefore, where members are socialized to hide their wind behind “manners” as if comporting themselves towards strangers in the civic sphere, certain Chinese middle-class households consolidate their associates’ belonging to the intimate sphere in ways also observable in non-middle class Western households (Lamont 1992).

Intimacy of this latter easy-going and “familial” sort is actively encouraged in China, especially at the most “local” end of social space. As a foreigner in the intimate sphere, I am frequently told that I needn’t say “thank you,” as this is for the public, non-intimate sphere. My relatives know I verbalize thanks out of deeply ingrained habit, but new acquaintances can find this disarming. It is particularly confusing that I cannot help but say “thank you” to my wife, which can potentially signify a lack of intimacy between us, which is not at all the case.

The relationship between professed intimacy and actual behaviour or experience is anyway complex. A steel worker who had invited me to visit his home one evening excitedly exhorted me to “be at ease” (随便), even as he tripped over himself rearranging chairs and offering me fruits to eat. His attempts to temporarily induct me into his sphere of intimacy were at odds with his excitement at the prospect of entertaining a foreign visitor in his home for the first time. Intimacy and civility can be also used together to exclude in complex ways. A family friend I had not met previously asked if he could serve me at dinner, saying “You’re a guest.” When I replied saying, “Thank you, I'm not really a guest, I have recently become family,” the man responded, “No, really, I’ll serve you,” as if asserting an intimacy with our hosts somehow more profound than my own. Foreigners in China are especially likely to be “honoured” in this way.

Foreign visitors to China often fail to play the role of guest assigned to them by their hosts by trying to pay for their share of a restaurant meal. Chinese hosts will vigorously protest this outcome. The desire to pay on the part of the Chinese is not necessarily about “face,” as in marking status or rank, though it is certainly incumbent on the guest to “give face” by allowing the Chinese partner to pay (Yang 1994). Neither is it necessarily about civility as in simple politeness. More often, the offer to pay is about the situational inclusion of the foreign visitor in the sphere of intimacy, even if only temporarily – i.e. where civil propriety and intimacy conflate. True reciprocity is only really expected from close friends and relatives, where the offer to pay may be accepted by the other party on the understanding that they will pay next time. Among youth, and where money is tight, monies may occasionally be divided equally, but dividing costs within families is anathema.

The above observations suggest that for many persons in China, intimacy is centred on kinship (cf. Fei, Hamilton, and Wang 1992; Hsu 1971; Yan 2003), ritual (cf. Yan 1996a, 1996b; Yang 1994), the body (again), and the situational inclusion of non-intimates to the familial sphere. Intimacy here is not best conceptualized as interior-secrets-revealed or knowledge-which-accumulates but is instead closer to the routine-familiarity-of-practice. This latter intimacy, moreover, is diametrically opposed to hygiene and civility (cf. Jullien 2015a). Marketers targeting at least some Chinese consumers, therefore, rather than trying to “achieve” intimacy as an instrumental marketing goal as if crossing a Cartesian “impasse” or “cordon sanitaire,” might better “inextricably weave themselves into the fabric of daily life” (Fournier 1998, 364–365), such that brands become markers of identity which routinely apply across diverse social contexts, say like Mao badges during the Cultural Revolution (H. Wang 2008).

Civility & the globalizing politics of personhood

In the mid-00s, China’s state media drove a major policy initiative around “civility” (文明). Newspapers exhorted citizens not to spit and throw rubbish (Krajewski 2009). Public noticeboards forcefully urged the citizenry to respect others’ space. Television advertisements featured celebrities acting with deference to non-intimate others, opening doors, and so on. Fireworks, which once marked weddings and funerals, were outlawed in large cities as a new form of ideology was propagandized. Entrance to public parks became universally free-of-charge, and public toilets much cleaner, more sanitary.

Typically, certain young adults try hardest to identify with civility, perhaps due to their formal education and exposure to international culture. Informant “Sam” (23) disliked it when his wife interrupted him while he was demonstrating his knowledge of American music. He made her wait until he had finished even though I offered him an opportunity to break off the conversation by averting my eyes from his to hers. Sam studied abroad for a year; his wife schooled in China. Sam also covered his mouth with his hand if speaking whilst eating; his wife did not. “Andy” (24) studied in South Africa and wanted to “learn manners” from me. “Cindy” (22) “liked the UK” because “people were more polite.” Clearly, these youths believe that re-enacting a certain set of behaviours from the cosmopolitan international sphere distinguishes themselves from their local surroundings and inherited past (Hannerz 1990). The performance of civility in China, however, is about economic and political power as well as age and generation, for as China increasingly engages with the modernizing, international, and “civil” sphere, the perception is commonplace in society that traditional forms of intimacy are rapidly being hollowed out of public space by private property and commodity ownership.

Consider luxury health club owner Du, who is reflecting on his responsibilities to society:

Chinese people must go through a certain adjustment before they have a high quality-of-personhood (素质). Most importantly, they must be educated. An environment is being created to manage those who don’t understand public morals, to force them to embrace civility. I’ll give you an example: if there’s a person who spits everywhere, and throws dirty things around, if you take them to the great hall in a five-star hotel, where the floor is clean and everyone is wearing Western suits and leather shoes, they will be too embarrassed to spit. A clean environment will force people to behave civilly.

Du clearly thinks that “civility” is Western in origin (“suits”), that civility relates to the cosmopolitan sphere (“five-star hotel”), and requires “embarrassing” Chinese people into changing their behavioural norms. The discourse of “quality-of-personhood” (素质) which Du draws upon conflates a popular perception of Chinese persons’ “lack” of manners and formal education, with issues of over-population in the countryside and the “lack” of progress among the lower rungs of post-socialist urban society (Anagnost 2004, 193). Neo-Marxist China scholars argue that this “lack” allows the Chinese state and its commercial allies to position themselves as “supplement,” as a form of statecraft and “neoliberal governmentality” (Jacka 2009; Ngai 2003).

Consider now Xiao, a graduate keen to speak the language of civility:

On the bus in Western countries, people will smile at each other to express kindness when their eyes meet, is this not so? But on buses in China, when two strangers’ eyes meet, they immediately hide away from each other. Why is this? It’s because there is a distance between people. It’s strange, a very indifferent feeling. Uncivil behaviours are universal here. Spitting randomly, or making lots of noise in public, upsetting people without the slightest self-awareness. For example, when we get on a bus, there’s no queuing, making people feel real regret. What can we say about the situation in China right now? It’s people’s hearts. People’s feelings are increasingly indifferent. No-one cares about strangers anymore. Human feelings have become very cold. It used to be the case that, when two people met for the first time, even if their only relation was a phone number, they wouldn’t break the feeling: it was group living (群体主义). But now it’s all cold, flat and lonely. It’s a real tragedy.

Xiao may be read as nostalgic for an intimacy felt to have been lost in urban spaces, a common notion where people are experiencing the breakdown of rural or communal living (Bach 2002). China has recently witnessed nostalgic consumption emerge in the form of “Cultural Revolution” restaurants, with period clothing, decor, foods, music, artefacts, etc. (Griffiths, Christiansen, and Chapman 2010). However, it is also clear that in the above excerpt that Xiao invokes a discourse of civility with his references to public behaviour in Western countries, and constructs China as having a problem in this regard. In conflating civil discourse with an attack on selfishness, however, Xiao is not so much bothered by spitting, failing to queue, etc, though this is what he mentions in the first instance. Rather, Xiao is bothered by the “indifference,” lack of “human feelings,” and lack of intimacy between people. Xiao, that is to say, seeks visible intimacy within the public sphere. He doesn’t see civil behaviour in terms of personal privacy or public responsibility at all, but rather through the prism of intimacy with others – precisely the opposite concept from an alternative point of view. While Xiao inveighs against “incivility,” he is actually speaking a different discourse, not the discourse of hygienic, civil, modernity.

It is clear that Chinese dispositions regarding intimacy differ greatly across persons and “types” of persons. Such dispositions dynamically compete in everyday life and are shaped by broader discourses and processes of globalization (cf. Yan 2003; 2009). Intimacies in China should not be thought of only in terms of interior-secrets-revealed and knowledge-which-accumulates. Intimacies in China comprise competing worldviews and might best be conceptualized in terms of the cultural production of meaning, power, and context. Intimacies between consumers and brands in China will therefore also need to be mediated through cultural and socio-political contexts.

Sexual intimacy: exploring taboo

Sex is where self and other come physically closest. Sexually intimate relationships, moreover, are where we might most expect intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed to emerge. Evidence for this emergence is relatively scant, however, suggesting China is not travelling on a simple linear continuum towards the West in these respects. Outside private marital contexts, attitudes to initiating sexual intimacy are relatively “conservative” (Higgins, Zheng, and Liu 2002, 1) compared to my native British culture and other Western cultures, though there are significant gender differences here, with Chinese males evidently more “proactive” than females (Blair and Scott 2019). Attitudes to sexual promiscuity remain “conservative,” too. Young adults dress in attractive guises, but exposure of more leg or cleavage than usual can easily provoke negative social judgements of sexual laxity or hyper-sexuality (Lei 2003). Only recently did it become possible to buy “racy” styles of lingerie without importing. On the other hand, China has an active “hook-up” culture today accessible through mobile apps (Luo and Yu 2022) and until recently, China also had a vibrant nightclubbing scene (Farrer and Field 2015). Chinese women of productive age have been shown to find sex an inextricable aspect of employment, particularly in transformations from the rural countryside to the modern urban sphere (Ding and Ho 2013, 43; Hanser 2005). Popular culture television shows have become more sexualized, too, with so many Imperial palace and office adulteries on screen, that from the late 2010s, and again recently, the central government has intervened to mandate “healthier” content for television nationwide.

Nevertheless, while China once appeared to be undergoing a “sexual revolution” (Farquhar 2002; Farrer 2002), cultures around sexuality in China today remain rather more “implicit” than “explicit.” Pornography is illegal, and China’s domestic intranet is policed for sexual innuendo, as well political dissent (Kuo 2020). Activities such as group sex carry a maximum prison sentence of five years (Doctoroff 2013, 177). Homosexuals often resign themselves to sham marriages and many use surrogate mothers to produce offspring to placate their own parents (Doctoroff 2013, 178). Popular dating shows reinforce “faithfulness” wherever possible, and celebrity sex scandals stand in disruptive contrast to such moralistic tropes, even if there is no surprise. If intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed means a generalized “openness,” this does not obviously characterize China’s sexual cultures.

Prostitution, however, where sexual intimacy is actively consumed in the public sphere, demonstrates the sexualization of the internationalizing and cosmopolitan domain. A simple online scan is enough to confirm ethnographic reports (Zheng 2008) that higher-end sex workers charge their customers more because they “seduce” their clients with impressions of sexual intimacy congruent with romantic love. Sex workers in the big-cities target local elites and expats for longer-term “intimate” relationships using digital media (Yuk-ha Tsang 2017). Lower-end sex workers might present as less cultivated, stripping and enacting sex with functional efficiency, without mimicking romantic intimacy. Prostitution has always lived alongside a code of repression and secrecy in China (Hyde 2001, 151), and since a nationwide crackdown was initiated in 2014, the “oldest trade” has anyway become much less prevalent. Shanghai’s massage parlours ceased trading, though anecdotally, some lower-end purveyors continued with customers separated merely by means of a curtain (Smart Shanghai 2019).

While China’s larger cities are comparatively anonymous, its lower-tier cities retain a communally monitored sense of “responsibility” to intimate others, with spying, prying neighbours inspired by their shared work-unit heritage (Bray 2005). Despite all the “loyalty” on the surface of lower-tier city discourse, however, citizens here of course do transgress in private (Luo and Yu 2022). Beneath the Socialist maxims daubed on the walls of my residential compound, e.g. “Society is in my heart,” are signs advertising the services of private detectives to spy on spouses suspected of adulterous liaisons. Divorced wives of all social ranks tell stories of husbands who “turned bad and ran off” in pursuit of women and riches.

In this context, the judgement of adultery primarily concerns the upsetting of spatial, almost “civil” gradations, between the familial, intimate sphere, and the public sphere – an almost bodily matter quite different to the morally categorical judgement framing adultery in Western cultures. Accordingly, Chinese persons engaged in “illegitimate” sexual intimacy do not “confess” their transgression to alleviate “guilt” as some persons do in Western cultures. Intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed has not evolved to this extent. Whereas transparency and truth are integrally part of intimacy in Western cultures, if one is discovered to have had illegitimate sexual intimacy in China, one need not necessarily feel internal guilt, but only fear of exposure to one’s family and social circles and the associated “shame.” Such a discovery, moreover, need not necessarily signal a total collapse in the marriage. Many Chinese wives stay with husbands known to be having affairs so long as this is appropriately compartmentalized from family life.

Even within a deeply intimate, sexual, and faithful marriage such as the author’s own, interior-secrets-revealed need not necessarily play a role in creating and maintaining intimacy. When I disclose the “inner truths” of my heart to my wife, seeking reciprocity in kind, and do not always find that immediately and explicitly forthcoming, I might receive as explanation something like, “My love is a fact, there is nothing to say.” From a certain Chinese perspective on intimacy, words are ultimately meaninglessness and insincere. Rather, deep feelings of emotional intimacy are immanent in actions, gestures, and attitudes which, as philosopher and sinologist François Jullien puts it, “displace” the self and open up individual agency to the transcendent “we” (Jullien 2015b).

To bring this back to marketing relationships and brands, sexual intimacy is generally ill-advised in China brand communications, no matter how implicit (though see the discussion on intimacy in brand communications further below). Nevertheless, we might draw some insights from how attitudes to sex contrast with China’s moral order at this point. The popularly acknowledged “pragmatic” relativism in China today, i.e. the absence of moral absolutes (e.g. Shang, Liu, and Cao 2019), may partly explain why Chinese consumers are allegedly so “fickle” or “disloyal” in their relationships with brands (Atsmon et al. 2010). China marketers who see customers as “mere” transactions and mistake tactical campaigns for long-term relationship building (which is frankly most China marketers, Williams 2021) might better form an “intimate” sense of “coming together” or “building community” through programmes which reward brand stakeholders for their allegiance, perhaps by emphasizing “kinship” extended to “broader family” (cf. Doctoroff 2013, 145-148). For more internationalizing or cosmopolitan consumers, brands might synthesize an “intimate” storytelling approach from “private” customer feedback, “word of mouth” sharing, “insider” branded information etc – i.e. position closer to intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed. Significantly, domestic Chinese brands excel at the former sort of strategy but struggle to develop the latter (cf. Wu, Borgersen, and Schroeder 2013; see also below). If deep feelings of sexually-charged emotional intimacy are sought in a brand positioning, marketers might better avoid a simple individualistic Cartesian romance, i.e. “She loves me; I love her,” and instead position for an intimacy in which “one is always meeting the other” anew (Jullien 2015b).

Summary of intimate stranger: foreigner in the field

The foregoing analysis has revealed a spectrum of social and symbolic space which describes different and competing ways of being intimate in China. For some Chinese persons, many non-sexual practices of intimacy remain within public space, where intimacy is not coterminous with privacy. For other Chinese persons, intimacy is expected to be closed, secret, out of sight, and coterminous with privacy. These conflicting understandings of intimacy, moreover, largely mirror the differences between China and modern-Western and cosmopolitan-international cultures in these respects (cf. Yan 2003). Perhaps most Chinese persons imagine China to occupy the “local” and “intimate” end of a spectrum of social and symbolic space, which ranges from spousal and familial relations, relatives, and friends – where actions are understood to be aligned with affection and situational ethics – through particular colleagues and strangers, to the civic sphere of employers, government, and the global community at large – which is imagined to be dominated by Western nations and cultures, and where actions are understood to be aligned with the interests of capital and governed in accordance with the international “rules-based” order. These conflicting understandings stand in dynamic tension, such that whenever Chinese enact intimacy or make related judgements of social belonging, distance and/or hygiene, they cannot help but co-create discourses which operate on local, national, and global levels.

Since the Western-originated concepts of intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed and knowledge-which-accumulates are insufficient to describe the complex, differentiated, and competing ways that Chinese enact intimacy, these concepts will also be insufficient to describe how Chinese consumers conceptualize and enact their relationships with brands. Chinese consumers will require targeting with campaigns designed to resonate with different kinds of intimacy. In many cases, brands should seek to create the perception of “intimate” integration into local life by emphasizing communal origins (cf. Hung and Chiu 2003; Tuan and Hoelscher 1977), kinship and its extensions (cf. Kipnis 1997; Knapp and Lo 2005; Yan 2003), ritual and everyday routines (cf. Yan 1996a, 1996b; Yang 1994), and the somatic body. In other cases, brands might tap into consumers’ desires to operate on supra-national and global levels by synthesizing an “intimate” storytelling approach, emphasizing “private” feedback, “word of mouth,” and “insider” secrets. These arguments are further developed below.

Public representations of intimacy

Intimacy in brand communications

The following section examines how intimacy is represented in China market advertising and assesses how brand communications “translate” into culture (cf. J. Wang 2008).

Representations of culturally residual forms of intimacy in Chinese advertising tend to be leveraged by domestic brands (cf. Tian and Dong 2011). They resemble familial bliss clichés with idyllic nuclear families – the father, mother, and single (urban) child (though some families who can afford it are now having a second baby), or with grandparents, with perfectly white smiles and warm hugs, slim figures and movie-star hairdos, plus giggling toddlers, in pastel-coloured surroundings. There are often also red and yellow colour-codes for signage and banners to signal “lucky” prosperity, “festive spirit,” “tradition,” and “the nation.” This is the “intimacy” which combines the ideographs for “family" or “kinship” with those for “density" or “near” (亲密，亲近). Alternatively, say for mass-market beer or teen fashion, adverts feature protagonists socializing in ways which, from the author’s own cultural perspective, can appear banal and/or forced – a sickly stereotype. Protagonists are shown in contexts which seem insufficiently real, air-brushed onto beaches or parks, or in poses of smiley, laughing delight, without any implied story. This is the intimacy which transforms from the private sphere and combines the ideographs for “family” and “friend” (亲友). A “deeper story” is unnecessary.

Correspondingly, where romance features in Chinese advertising, representations are usually “safe” – modern princes and princesses with “cutesy” love hearts, hinting only at a preconfigured archetypical romance story. No risk, no secrets-revealed, no abandonment or lust. International advertising executives might search in vain for forms of “interior” significance in these communications, which for the target audience might be unnecessary and impractical. Regrettably, I cannot recall a China market advertisement sophisticated enough in its narrative form to codify deep feelings of romantic or sexually-charged emotional intimacy as a relationship in which “one is always meeting the other” anew (Jullien 2015b).

International luxury brand communications push the envelope of cultural relevance and the boundaries of desirability versus social constraint hardest, using “taboo” foreign codes around the “immorality” of pleasure. Remy-Martin targets nouveau-riche “playboy” consumers with the exhortation to “Break [their] heart’s limits” (跨越心极限) and visual codes of sexual promiscuity and social status. Mercedes-Benz not-so-implicitly encode seduction and transactional sex between younger women and wealthy men, with asymmetrically juxtaposed semiotics in their 2008 “SLK” campaign. Gucci daringly extended campaign codes of lust, temptation, and implicit adultery into China with “Guilty.” Notably, Chinese luxury brands (e.g. Maotai, Shangxia) do not leverage these codes, but rather employ ethno-nationalism and nostalgia in ways broadly comparable to retro- brand communications in Western cultures (cf. Brown, Sherry, and Kozinets 2023; Tian and Dong 2011).

Only Western luxury brands explicitly appeal to intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed. Bvlgari, Cartier, Chanel, Lancome, and Omega have A’ list models and actresses such as Nicole Kidman and Zhang Ziyi lean forward into the camera, make direct eye contact, and exhibit warm, knowing smiles, as though they are about to tell you a secret. These representations are reinforced by whispered voices, playfully cocked aside heads, slightly guilty looks, dressed-down styles, and relaxed demeanours quite at odds with the reverential distance celebrities are usually represented with in the China market. For at least some Chinese consumers, these advertisements may not signify intimacy at all. If they represent aspiration, they likely do so primarily because they are unusual and different from normative representations (cf. Hung, Yiyang Li, and Belk 2007).

Brands for whom sexual intimacy is part of their consumer proposition expose China’s cultural fault-lines in this area. Condom brand Durex targeted millennials with a social media-led strategy featuring online games and articles about sex titled, “Nine Amazing Facts About the Clitoris,” and “One Sentence to Describe Your First Time?” This content generated considerable consumer interest in a country with little formal sex education, where many people continue to feel shy about talking about sex (Steinfeld 2014). In 2015, Durex ran another campaign, a live stream advertisement showing fifty couples lying in bed with their significant others. This campaign generated massive viewership but also many complaints – both from viewers who felt Durex revealed too much, and from viewers who wanted more to be revealed.

Homologous patterns can be observed when we analyse hygiene advertising and ads for skin lightening (cf. Li et al. 2008; Schein 1994). Glossy shampoo, face wash, and skin cream adverts in China are implicitly set against blackened teeth, foul smells, over-long fingernails with visible dirt, and public nose-picking. “Modern” scientific codes, close-ups of molecular structure, lasers, white coats etc, are juxtaposed against representations of “traditional” mind–body holistic health, circulating energy, and terms for bodily organs and meridian systems – depending on the brand positioning (cf. Tian and Dong 2011). While international brands promote “cleanliness” as instrumental rationalism and relate this to democratic public-spiritedness, domestic brand hygiene communications promote a vision which is “healthy,” ego-centric, local, and affective – something that the customer is encouraged to “feel” so much as “achieve” for a purpose, and something which can be shared with persons close to you (cf. Zhou and Belk 2005). The challenge for hygiene brands is not therefore so much to balance hygiene with nature, as might immediately be apparent from advertisements in this space, but to bridge a local, embodied, interpersonal, and affective rationality, with an internationalizing, objective, public, and instrumental rationality (cf. Wu, Borgersen, and Schroeder 2013).

Intimacy on social media

We will now look at social media, where intimacy is no longer dependent on physical space but can be created in online platforms, where users share content with contacts.

Chinese social media users have recently begun to reveal unflattering “truths” about themselves such as “just woke up” or “without make-up” selfies in much the same ways as overseas social media users do on international platforms. Young women in China’s urban centres post “before” and “after” images of themselves in fancy clothes and make-up, and again in plain clothing without make-up, to mark their return journeys to their familial homes at Chinese New Year. Chinese women also post armpit hair selfies, which not only renegotiates how women are portrayed in public from a gender-politics perspective, but also creates a sense of “intimacy” with their social media connections by revealing an aspect the self which is usually disguised. Chinese celebrities have begun to use social media in similar ways, too. Actress Fan Bingbing post images of herself without make-up. Model Angelababy posts images of herself sick in bed. These behaviours recall the strategies of US popular culture stars Beyonce and Kim Kardashian who mix photoshoot-ready snaps with “live broadcasts” of pregnancy tests and “behind-the-scenes” images of beauty treatments. Social media, therefore, is an arena where Chinese people are reshaping their sense of space and boundaries by creating a sense of intimacy as “secrets revealed,” despite the government’s ever-tighter internet monitoring.

Social media is also an arena where distinctions between public and private domains are blurred in the construction of intimacy. Take luxury “hideaway” boutique hotels, which reflect evolving social aspirations regards the countryside (Griffiths, Christiansen, and Chapman 2010). Consumers of the rural idyll here want privacy, exclusivity, and a related form of intimacy in the experience, yet they also post about their consumption on WeChat. More generally, social media is a domain where shared information can bleed into public space when posts attract the attention of broader internet users. Chinese social media users are known to aggressively research and publicly expose private matters in “human flesh searches” (人肉搜索). More positively, private interests can snowball into collective sentiments on social media and eventually motivate wider social action – e.g. the “Free lunch for children” (免费午餐) and “Microblogs combat child-trafficking” (微博打拐) campaigns.

Brands can capitalize on the way social media is changing society, not least because the traditional concept of guanxi accustoms Chinese consumers to performing affectivity for instrumental purposes (cf. Kipnis 1997). Brands must avoid being too intrusive into people’s personal space or risk raising legal issues around privacy, but boundaries in this area are significantly lower than in Western markets. Chinese social media and internet users generally are subject to unsolicited messaging from unfamiliar commercial entities in ways which Western users of the Chinese internet find chaotic and offensive. Again, this suggests that intimacy in China can be conceptualized differently to Western cultures where instrumentality and affectivity are more separated (cf. Peng and Nisbett 1999).

Intimacy in music

Music is another area where marketers and brands can create intimacy between listeners and distant performers. Popular music in Western cultures typically leverages a narrative which speaks of romantic “interior secrets” with sexual undertones (Arnett 2002). When romantically explicit codes of intimacy were introduced to China in the 1980s by Taiwanese and Hong Kong pop music artists such Deng Lijun and Wang Fei, however, these artists were banned by the authorities because their songs featured implicitly “pornographic” lyrics. Chinese popular music is increasingly diverse today, but Chinese musical narratives still typically evoke a sense of intimacy more akin to suffering, sadness, and sentimentality than sexual pleasure (cf. Kipnis 1997). Popular songs vocalize the “feelings of the heart” and heartbreaks experienced, rather than sexual intimacies. Their narratives also encode intimacy as a collective experience by speaking towards shared memories of poverty and hardship, nostalgia for simpler times, and about distance from the familial home, and the feelings of longing to return. Pop-superstar Jay Chou’s 2002 “Return to the past” (回到过去) or his 2022 “Still Wandering” (還在流浪) – below here – represent blends of this contextually embedded “nostalgic” intimacy with a sentimental “romantic” style of intimacy, in a “storytelling” poetic form.

“Still Wandering” (2022)

The old book stand and empty beer cans are scattered on the ground.

Memories that were written off have rusted by the roadside.

There’s an indifference that permeates this small town.

The pace of this city is slow in this way.

The twinkling of the neon lights reflected on the window.

Can we still come across the beautiful times that we’ve missed out on?

The old train station and empty carriages.

I miss the times when everything was bustling.

The lights from the shop signs are bright in the night.

Leaving the baggage from the past behind in a foreign place,

I decided to leave this place.

When you receive this letter, I’ll still be wandering.

The promise we made that year is still in my heart.

I always carry around a picture of you smiling.

Darling, how are you doing?

Brands in China blend codes of intimacy in similarly skilful ways. Johnnie Walker had Ogilvy fuse sentimental codes with an “intimate” storytelling style of delivery to bring China’s “economic reforms and opening” to life from the perspective of property tycoon Pan Shiyi’s personal “rags-to-riches” experiences, in their 2011 “Words of Journey” (语路) campaign.

Parent–child relationships are a similarly emotive and often overlapping theme, particularly where the older generation are shown to make enormous sacrifices for their child’s future, or where children demonstrate filial piety by rewarding their parents in kind. Bank of China explored these latter tropes of intimacy in the context of a mother and daughter relationship for a film produced in 2012. Tencent’s 2011 “Your companion of 12 years” told a similar story, about a Chinese student overseas who maintained intimacy with his parents as is filially required despite being unable to return home to celebrate Chinese New Year as per custom.

There is also evidence of a trajectory where brand communications have leveraged more universalizing themes in more recent years. Bank of China’s 2023 “Understanding Brings Us Closer” campaign explores a protagonist’s care for his family yet also extends familial codes of intimacy to civic consciousness and environmental sustainability. Significantly, this campaign was produced for Hong Kong, where sensibilities differ from the mainland. Tencent’s 2021 “Change for Good” brought attention to China’s “left behind” children phenomenon in the form of charity for non-intimate others, which is still a new and evolving concept in China.

Summary of public representations of intimacy

The preceding section has examined how intimacy is represented in China market brand communications, Chinese social media, and Chinese popular music, further illustrating the differences between Chinese and Western inflected concepts of intimacy within the China's society and market.

Discussion

Two Western culture inflected paradigms of intimacy (Jullien 2015a; Kasulis 2002) dominate scholarship in the marketing and consumer behaviour disciplines: intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed or self-disclosure (e.g. Beatty, Huseld, and Schneier 2003, 112; Ting-Peng, Li, and Turban 2009, 3; Welté, Cayla, and Cova 2022, 657), and intimacy as knowledge-which-accumulates through observation (e.g. Akçura and Srinivasan 2005; Yim, Tse, and Chan 2008, 742). This article has de-centred these paradigms by exploring how intimacies in China emerge in complex co-created ways, from contextual settings, from the local construction of space and place (e.g. Bray 2005; Hung and Chiu 2003; Knapp and Lo 2005; Tuan and Hoelscher 1977), through kinship and its extensions (e.g. Fei, Hamilton, and Wang 1992; Hsu 1971; Yan 2003), through ritual and embodied everyday practices (e.g. Yan 1996a; Yang 1994), and through the situational instantiation of boundaries which separate the sphere of intimacy from the public and private spheres (Griffiths 2012). Intimacies in China do not only have individual dimensions, as in the Western perspective, but are immanent within a social and cultural dimension (Jullien 2015a, 2015b). Intimacies in China have different meanings than they do in Western cultures, yet Chinese society today exhibits multiple and often conflicting views of intimacy which interact across diverse social domains and are shaped by broader processes of globalization (cf. Yan 2003, 2009). Since intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed and intimacy as knowledge-which-accumulates are insufficient to describe the realities of consumers’ lived experiences in China, these paradigms will also be insufficient to describe how Chinese consumers conceptualize and enact their relationships with consumption and brands. Following Steadman, Medway, and Banister (2023) and in line with Cederholm and Holtman (2010), Holt (1997), Nguyen and Belk (2013), and Thompson and Hirschman (1995), who also emphasize the social and cultural dimension, I summarize my primary empirical findings here and outline the three key contributions to the Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) literature which stem from them.

On the one hand, China exhibits a “traditional” and residual view, where intimacy is centred on the somatic body and embedded in physical and social space, in local networks of symbolic relations, and in affective ties forged through reciprocal economies of exchange (Fei, Hamilton, and Wang 1992; Hsu 1971). In this view, non-sexual forms of opening the body to the social sphere are considered healthy and natural. Expressions of intimacy here are less explicit than the “modern” view, and even among spouses and lovers as much about role-responsibility and devotion as about love and romance (cf. Yan 2003). This is the form of intimacy which is closer to the routine-familiarity-of-practice than the Western paradigms (Jullien 2015a). Intimacy here is continually immanent, not a Cartesian state of mind. This intimacy is less an instrumental goal “achieved” than the basis for experience and interaction (Robinson 2013; Tuan and Hoelscher 1977; Kasulis 2002). It is the “affective-becoming conative force” by which feelings and experience “extend” into the phenomenological world (Robinson 2013).

On the other hand, there is a “modern” view which prioritizes intimacy as interior revelation, authority, and vulnerability (Masters 2013; Prager 1997). Intimacy here is largely a private affair accompanied by an acquired deference to the formally codified rules of the “civilised” public order and the universalizing, democratic, rational, rule-based tropes characteristic of marketized and cosmopolitan cultures (cf. Yan 2003; 2009). In this view, the “opening” of the body in public space is conceptualized in terms of urban society’s enforcement of hygiene, and expressions of intimacy between family members are more likely to be spontaneous, explicit, and, in the case of spouses and lovers, articulated in terms of romance. This intimacy is more centred on individuals and can be more verbal and logocentric than the “traditional” and residual view articulated above (Jullien 2015a).

Finally, there is a “post-modern,” hyper-real, and emergent view, where intimacy is increasingly divorced from physical space and fragmented through digital technology and social media. Here, intimacy is politicized and represents new frontiers for personhood, privacy, and social power – i.e. new horizons for intersubjectivity. Forms of intimacy here might be seen as immanent but not embodied; verbal and visual, but not a Cartesian state of mind. These analyses are not to posit a linear continuum whereby Western paradigms for intimacy are eclipsing China’s more indigenous intimacies. Rather, China’s multiple intimacies interact in dynamic tension and will continue to evolve in response to globalization and China’s official ideology – which is today increasingly insular – for at least as long as China’s political status quo, class structures, and enormous generational differences, persist.

Firstly, these findings contribute to CCT by drawing the four “a priori” aspects of consumer–brand relationships articulated by Fournier (1998) into critical perspective. The first of these aspects, “Reciprocity” (Fournier 1998, 344), is insufficient for intimacy as I have described it, as intimacy is not simply “achieved between” individuals but emerges dynamically within and is mediated by socio-cultural contexts. My analysis of China, moreover, shows that where social actors practice the same culture, intimacy can be a collective experience and, as Fournier herself writes, “endure despite low levels of affective involvement” (1998, 364–365). Fournier’s second aspect, the “meaning” and experience of intimacy in relationships (1998, 344), as I have shown, is locally determined, multivarious across contexts, and differs across types of persons, such that “elaborate knowledge structures, with richer layers of meaning reflecting deeper levels of intimacy” (Fournier 1998, 365) need not only conform to interior-secrets-revealed and knowledge-which-accumulates (cf. Bengtsson’s critique of Fournier 2003, 156–157) – indeed, intimacy is often closer to the routine-familiarity-of-practice. “Multiplicity,” Fournier’s third aspect (1998, 344), necessarily follows, and diverse views of intimacy will require different consumer–brand relationship approaches. “Temporality,” Fournier’s fourth aspect, holds, though not only because intimate relationships “evolve and change,” as Fournier puts it (1998, 344), but because intimacy has a shared historicity – that is, is less like a story which is logocentrically “told,” as per interior-secrets-revealed, and more like a story told in being lived (cf. Carr 1991). Intimacy thus understood is immanent in action and is always emotionally becoming – a “resource which opens onto infinity and is never settled” (Jullien 2015b).

Secondly, my research re-evaluates Max Blackston’s foundational study of consumer–brand relationships, which holds that relationships are expressed by the formula Trust = 1/Risk x Credibility x Intimacy (1993). Here, intimacy alone is insufficient for trust. My analyses offer the suggestion that this formula might better be reworked as Intimacy = Trust / (1Risk x Credibility). Trust is implied by intimacy, whether intimacy obtains through interior-secrets-revealed or not, and is given wherever social or consumption risks are taken. Credibility, on the other hand, obtains in the “temporality” (Fournier 1998, 344) and social dimension of intimacy, and is earned by the other party. Intimacies of culturally and situationally appropriate forms might therefore be necessary and even sufficient for consumer–brand relationships, i.e. the primary a priori goal of relationship branding, and not only a single aspect of brand relationship quality alongside “passion,” “commitment,” etc. as per Fournier’s study (1998, 366).

Thirdly, my analyses suggest that it matters less whether consumers’ relationships with brands are merely analogous with or qualitatively the same as person-to-person relationships, as has previously been debated (Bengtsson 2003). What might matter more, is that when scholarship asserts that the meaning and experience of brands is often “shared” and “connects us” (Ahuvia 2022), or that consumer-to-brand relationships are three-way “person-thing-person” relationships (Bengtsson 2003, 156–157), scholars might also consider the sense in which consumer-to-brand relationships are always also three-way consumer-culture-brand relationships. This is not only to argue that “intimate knowledge” of other persons can be “extended” to consumer–brand relations (Belk 1988, 150), as if the latter type of relationships were analogous to person-thing relationships, for they are not. Rather, this is to argue that there is a “third” supra-individual social and cultural dimension to all relationships. Consumers do form “communities” around shared brand meaning and experience (Ahuvia 2022), and consumers do “extend intimate knowledge” (Belk 1988, 150) of other persons to consumer–brand relations, even if this involves anthropomorphism (Fournier 1998, 344–345). However, when consumers use a branded product, the meaning of their doing so is not subjectively determined, i.e. by themselves, or objectively determined by the brand, but intersubjectively, and not only with those who share the meaning. but also by those who do not, in an indefinite and ongoing manner. Simply put, consumers do not know how they will look in a branded Chinese Qipao or Sun Yat Sen jacket until they see how other people respond when they wear it; the meaning of their doing so, moreover, will vary in accordance with context, with each whole and specific situation.

If intimacy with customers is an a priori goal of marketing (Akçura and Srinivasan 2005), marketers should look for intimacy in the fabric of socio-cultural experience everywhere – not only in the revelation of interior secrets or in knowledge which accumulates, and not only in China. Marketers desperately want consumers to be relatively uniform, to fit into well-established pre-existing categories, but they simply don’t. Marketers must move beyond Cartesian essentialisms of mind and models of naively homogenous cultures, and search for intimacy in socio-cultural contexts, reflexively interpreting its contours, tensions, and internal contradictions in holistic, structural, and situational terms, thus “extending” themselves into the phenomenological world (Robinson 2013; cf. Belk 1988). At the same time, marketers must recognize that relational concepts like “intimacy” implicate an entire cultural system. In these respects, cultural analysis is perhaps the only tool which brings marketers close enough to consumption to understand how to position brands in intimate relation to it.

My research has not proven a causality such that the codes of intimacy I have identified necessarily translate into Chinese consumers’ relationships with brands, it is true. However, the fact that I have analysed the codes of intimacy across multivarious domains of everyday life, and further shown how these same codes feature and interact in branded communications across diverse domains, is sufficient to affirm that a wide anthropological “detour,” taking in history, context, and the close observation of social life, can successfully decentre a relational concept (i.e. “intimacy”) which marketers otherwise take for granted, and critically stimulate marketing theory and practice.

Further research might take my analyses of the implicit diverse cultural drivers of intimacy as hypotheses for straight-forwardly empirical research, i.e. the explicit questioning of Chinese and other consumers about their relationships with brands. Scholarship may also explore the role of intimacy in cross-cultural brand communication where intimacy is achievable, but meaning is constantly a challenge (Piller 2007). Similarly, researchers might also examine business entertainment (Osburg 2013), commercial friendships (Welté, Cayla, and Cova 2022), or employee engagement programmes (De Waal and van der Heijden 2016) – where intimacy could remain enigmatic or essential, depending on contextual factors. Further research might employ the optics developed here to explore human relationships with Generative AI, where chatbots are uncannily authentic in their intelligence and affectivity yet the “intimacy” which humans experience is solely verbal and / or visual and divorced from physicality and the somatic body (Abonizio and Coren 2024). Finally, it will be valuable to explore implications for disciplines where the sharing of intimate feelings and interior secrets is essential everywhere, such as psychotherapy (Masters 2013), and diverse cultural factors there.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their constructive assistance in preparing the manuscript. Thanks also to Giana Eckhardt, Julien Cayla, and Toby Lincoln for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael B. Griffiths

Michael B. Griffiths (Mike) earned an MA in Chinese studies (with distinction) and a PhD in social anthropology of China at the University of Leeds. His publications include “Consumers & Individuals in China: Standing Out, Fitting In,” “Chinese Consumers: The Romantic Reappraisal,” and “Bittersweet China: New Discourses of Hardship & Social Organization.” Michael was the Director of Ethnography at Ogilvy and the Global Expert in Cultural Insight & Strategy at Kantar TNS. Michael leverages anthropology to make brand innovations and communications relevant and distinctive within local culture. He identifies the truths and tensions in a society where brands can create the most impact and analyzes both brand and consumer-generated content to assess positioning and equity. Clients he has served include The Economist, SC Johnson, Smithfield's, BAT, Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Carlsberg, Ford, Porsche, BMW, Hershey's, Planters, etc. Michael is the winner of the Needscope global prize for “Innovation” with semiotics and the Ginny Valentine “Badge of Courage” global award for immersive work in The Islamic Republic of Iran.