A Comparative Analysis of Hybrid Car Advertisements in the USA and China: Desire, Globalization, and Environment

Abstract

This paper compares hybrid car advertisements in the USA and China—the two largest car markets of the world—and analyzes the cultural, psychic, and historical factors that interrupt the translation of hybrids' “eco-friendly” appeals to China. I evoke psychoanalysis to read the unconscious structures of desire embedded in the two distinct groups of advertising discourse. My analysis shows that while the American ads seek to erase the self from a fantasy of eco-harmony, the Chinese ones try to expand and multiply the self in the technical gaze of the West. Toward environmental pollution, the American ads respond with guilt and self-blame and the Chinese react with disgust and escapism. I argue that both types of discourse are structured around a psychic loss, which is inaugurated by each culture's traumatic encounter with the technology of the motorcar.

Keywords:

• green consumerism
• environmental advertising
• hybrid electric cars
• USA
• China
• psychoanalysis
• desire

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Corrigendum

Notes

[1] Advertisements analyzed in this paper were collected through online data gathering as well as archival research in two Chinese cities (Shanghai and Beijing) and two American cities (Iowa City, IC, and Durham, NC). Some photographed prints with low resolutions are replaced with their digital versions located online. I employed three sets of standards to select these advertisements: (1) representative value, they must contain certain thematic, verbal, visual, or cinematic features shared by many ads from the same cultural group; (2) comparative value, they must display certain features differing from the corresponding ads from the comparing cultural group; (3) symptomatic value, they must demonstrate certain inconsistency between their formal features and the ideological meanings they intend to signify. Due to the hybrid production and consumption process of global media, I tend to group ads more according to their textual features than the geographical locations and nationalities of their producers and consumers.

[2] NB is the short form for niu bi, a Chinese colloquial expression meaning “incredible” or “super cool.”

[3] Although the Lacanian metaphors of the hysteric and the obsessional are highly sexualized, I am using them to describe nonsexual desire that can be shared by men and women.

[4] To clarify, Toyota Reiz is a high-power mid-size sedan with a V6 engine and all-wheel drive. It is sold in Japan under the name Mark X.