| Abstract | This dissertation examines the relationship between nationalism and commercialization in early 20th century China through the lenses of commodity consumption and pictorial advertising. Its focus is the commodification of nationalism as a set of strategies by entrepreneurs and officials to unite politics and economics in the cause of national salvation and profits. The study, centered on the Shanghai business community and middle class, probes how leaders of the National Goods Movement (Guohuo yundong) used goods to sell nationalism, and nationalism to sell goods. Drawing on late Qing reformist notions of “commercial warfare” as a substitute for military resistance to foreign aggression, the dissertation engages political, economic, social, and cultural issues by tracing how theorists of the early Republic reconfigured earlier ideas about the role of commodities in China's quest for wealth and power. Unlike most historical studies of the era, this one highlights consumers and consumption, focusing on mass-produced "daily commodities" as key elements in Shanghai's cosmopolitan culture. These are placed in the context of guohuo (national goods) institution building, notably commercial exhibitions of Chinese products; bourgeois social mobility; and Guomindang nationbuilding. A separate chapter probes the unconventional marketing methods of a conventionally structured firm, Huacheng Tobacco, which sold elite lifestyle rather than the moralistic patriotism characteristic of guohuo ideology. Themes from chapters focusing on theory, institutions, and the corporate world are reprised in the final chapter, which discusses a critical 1928 essay on Chinese advertising theory, and then analyzes two series of pictorial advertisements in a historically grounded, symbolic reading. The discussion centers on the gendering of advertisements as an aesthetic commercial device, amid elite ambivalence about the shifting social roles of women. A brief conclusion proposes advertising as a visual vernacular that gave meaning to these newly available commodities, and suggests that the hints of a culturally based, commodified civic consciousness may be seen in the broadening of relations between people and their purchases. The efforts of guohuo, leaders to channel urban consumption toward patriotic purchase, however, faltered as Shanghai's cosmopolitan consumers bought what they wanted to enhance their own lives. |
