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The information discussed above representations and advertising provide essential contexts for cross-cultural comparison of women's advertising representations in this study. As we discussed above, media and marketing theories hold that advertising representations are in the same line with the social norms and cultural values. As a significant place for negotiating power relations and cultural identity, advertising address issues concerning dynamic global and local interactions, shaping emerging gender and subject identities, evolving advertisers and audiences communication, shifting market and media relations and so on.

Regarding the Chinese context, according to Li (2016), China is becoming more assertive since the 2007-2008 global financial recession. Western modernity has been increasingly questioned, and the dynamic relationship between local and global forces is consequently changing (Li, 2016). On the other hand, in the last decades, the Chinese government has attempted to recreate Chinese national identity and de-Westernise China through vigorously promoting Chinese culture and economic and military powers, selectively restoring the communist legacy, and strengthening the censorship of publications and media contents (Li, 2016; Sun, 2010). This context

makes Chinese advertising representation often reflect the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the contradiction between tradition and modernity, as well as the scramble between socialism and capitalism.

Li (2016: 106) takes Chinese consumer culture as the example to analyse the relations between the global forces and the local advertising industry. She argues that nationalism and cosmopolitanism have become central to consumer culture in China. On the one hand, scholars (e.g. Jian, Wang & Wang, 2007; Shirk, 2007; Li, 2009) have realised the rising nationalism in contemporary Chinese consumer culture. On the other hand, Western brands and lifestyles continue to have a high level of popularity in China (Li, 2016). Thus, Chinese advertising can be understood as the product of the negotiation between nationalism and 'cosmopolitanism with Chinese characteristics' (Rofel, 2007: 11) under the influence of four major factors including market, technology, culture and policy (Li, 2016: 106).

Zhang & Shavitt (2013) state that Chinese advertising discourses and practices are the syntheses of competing values such as traditional Chinese culture, modernity, Confucianism, socialism, and capitalism. Li (2016: 30) further argues that the likely conflicting ideas co-existed in Chinese consumer culture, including Orientalism and Occidentalism, Chineseness and Western values, and nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in fact, are not completely different and conflicting, but 'rather are different business and advertising strategies exploited by different players at different times'. For Li (2016: 30), the global and the local 'must not be understood as opposing forces but as constituting each other; their interactions also involve regional forces'. In addition, globalisation alters the content of Chinese brand advertising to a certain extent. In the past, most ads were produced by advertisers of a particular country and consumed by audiences of the same country (Belk, Bryce & Pllay, 1985; Frith & Sengupta, 1991). Griffin, Viswanath & Schwartz (1994) find that with the rapid spread of global brands and transnational corporations, standardised ad ideas can be

created in the head offices of advertising agencies in Europe and America and run in other countries with only simple modifications such as translated slogans, and branch offices of multinational agencies. This situation is especially evident in Chinese ads of global brands such as Coca-Cola.

Moreover, according to the statistics of Oriental Outlook (2018), about 5 % of the Chinese students graduated from American and British universities have chosen to work in advertising and media agencies when they went back to China. The Western education background might make them follow the British or American styles when creating advertising campaigns. In short, these interlinking factors have significant influences on Chinese advertising, which work interdependently with how the relations between local and global, between tradition and modernity, between government and ad agencies, and between advertiser and consumer, are coordinated and imagined. The West-China relationship, in particular, plays a crucial role in understanding Chinese advertising representations.

4.5 Research Gap

The literature review of representation and advertising representation, as well as the particularity of advertising campaigns in China and the UK, co-support the comparison and analysis of the women's advertising representations in this study. However, few previous studies have made in-depth comparisons of the differences and similarities of advertising industries, advertising representations, advertising characteristics and relevant laws and regulations between the UK and China. Therefore, this research will attempt to fill in this gap. At the same time, this study has extended the cross-cultural comparison between China and the UK into the fields of advertising representations and woman's representations. Through the comparative analysis of woman's advertising representations, this study explores how the political and social-cultural factors and gender concepts caused the different advertising

representations in the UK and China respectively and however the globalisation, feminism and patriarchy discourses shaped the similarities of the British and Chinese representations.

4.6 Summary

This chapter reviews the literature of representation, advertising, and advertising representation. In terms of advertising, both British and Chinese advertisings are key objects for understanding cultural homogeneity, heterogeneity and hybridity, and gender in British and Chinese cultures. The next chapter will continue the discussion of woman and advertising representation, and focus on the previous empirical research of women's advertising representations.

Chapter 5 Literature Review: Women and Advertising Representations