English, advertising and positioning: the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives

1. Introduction

Few would dispute the claim that English wields much power and influence globally. In China, like in other countries and regions, the spread of English in its role as a global language alongside a buoyant wave of global capitalism has had and continues to have a huge impact on the Chinese language and culture. This raises issues about China’s national identity, the collective identity of Chinese people, language planning and policy, and so forth. Studies have been conducted to examine crucial questions regarding whether English is a threat to national identity of contemporary China or to the Chinese language and culture (e.g., Li 2012; Pan and Seargeant 2012). But the question of whether English exerts an impact on Chinese people’s daily lives remains almost entirely unaddressed in the field of sociolinguistics (Bolton and Graddol 2012).

Perhaps no other topic is more at the intersection of mass media and everyday life than identity. Positioned at the nexus of media, linguistics and identity, this article from a text linguistic perspective addresses this research lacuna in the literature by investigating how the Chinese people of mainland China are discursively influenced through the use of English in Chinese advertising within the framework of positioning (e.g., Harré 1998; Davies and Harré 1990; Harré and van Langenhove 1999). The basic assumption is that English, being labelled “global” and associated with “popular culture capital” (Fiske 1992), has become a new brand positioning strategy in Chinese advertising deployed to draft and define Chinese people as the target audience. This study is not a diachronic but a synchronic investigation conducted at a specific point of time with reference to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, an important social, cultural, and political event in China’s history. Data for analysis are printed Chinese–English bilingual advertisements collected from some newspapers and magazines published in mainland China during 2007.

In its focus on the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives, the article concerns itself with the analysis of the particular use of English in Chinese advertising that is crucial to the production or facilitation of such an impact. Sociolinguists nowadays increasingly share the perception of heterogeneous practices of English across the world (e.g., Crystal 1997; Kachru 1982; Pennycook 2007, 2010). When used in Chinese advertising, English is likely to have particular linguistic features that could be perceived as “part of social communicative styles, and thereby serve to positioning the speaker [here the target audience] in space” (Auer 2007, 15). In this study, style as defined in modern sociolinguistic theory is a concept, which mediates between linguistic variability and practices of social categorization of self or other; linguistic variability is seen as a resource for constructing socially interpretable and interpreted styles (Eckert 2004, 43). Following Irvine (2001), this article takes the sociocultural distinctiveness of English usage in Chinese advertising as one of the key features of style applied as a way to position oneself or others in social space. Because the process of positioning is more or less indirectly marked or cued by the specific use of English that aptly represents an instance of style, we may take the particular use of English as an analytical platform for the exploration of how Chinese people’s daily lives are affected to various degrees. Findings could be used as a foundation for a discussion of the local politics of English in China and the question of whether Chinese people’s sense of cultural identity is being threatened or undermined. In the following, I develop why the use of English as a pair language in Chinese advertising could be treated as the focus of analysis for studying this research topic.

2. English, advertising and positioning

Advertisements as a site of identity formation are “part of a variety of social struggle” through which target audiences are defined or wish to be defined (Matheson 2005, 55; Dyer 1982). Other than actualizing existing “codes” of meaning, advertisements create an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) of target audiences by acting as a culture created against or upon national and cultural “Others” (McQuail 2000). In the imagined community, the members of target audiences may not know each other but all share an idea of belonging to a collective identity, that is, “in the minds of each lives the image of their communication” (Anderson 1983, 15). The notion of imagined community is useful in that it allows us to transcend a concentration on the immediate environment of target audiences and to reach the wider communities in which these imagined identities may have a significant impact on their immediate sense of self and on their daily lives.

Linguistic resources play a pivotal role in the creation of both imagined communities and possibilities for shared identities to be imagined (e.g., Queen 1997; Spitulnik 1997; Wong and Zhang 2001). Advertisements are prime examples for demonstrating the importance of strategic language use not only in the formation of an imagined community but also in the creation of a discursive space for people to find the feeling of belonging to this shared but anonymous community. This is normally fulfilled through ideological processes that highlight the transferability of symbolic meanings created for the product to the individual who identify with the target audience of the product (e.g., Danesi 2006; Wernick 1991; Williamson 1978). By this, it implicitly assumes active engagements of target audiences with advertising, along with the social circulation of ads, in the construction of an imagined community (Spitulnik 1997).

The transcultural flow of English as a global language has developed itself into “a language of imagined communities” bringing a “refashioning of identity” (Pennycook 2007, 6). It is certainly true that English is not infrequently deployed in non-English-speaking countries as an alternative linguistic or discursive resource for imagining a community and defining the members of this community to stand in contrast to the sanitized image offered by hegemonic institutions. A case in point is the use of English in non-English advertising that provides greater possibilities for people of a locality to interact with new others, generating new, often hybrid, selves (e.g., Lee 2006; Martin 2006). Crucially, the provision of alternatives in the one-way mediated communication of advertising is unidirectional. The implicit assumption is that, as soon as ads are distributed, they are simultaneously participated in and almost automatically produce a feeling of a shared collectivity because of the use of English. Thus, it makes sense to expect English to be mobilised in advertising for moulding and defining people of non-English-speaking countries.

This study, as noted earlier, takes the concept of “positioning” (e.g., Harré 1998; Davies and Harré 1990; Harré and van Langenhove 1999) as a point of entry into the ways in which the community of Chinese people is imagined and defined through the use of English in Chinese advertising. Positioning theory has been applied in the examination of the ways in which people position themselves through alignments to elements including, for example, religion, place, gender, and stylistic choices (e.g., Georgakopoulou 2007; Modan 2007). Having originated in social psychology, positioning as used by Harré, Davies, and others refers to

the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced storylines. There can be interactive positioning in what one person says positions another. And there can be reflexive positioning in which one positions oneself. (Davies and Harré 1990, 48)

The clear implication is that this approach to identity construction and formation emphasizes the negotiable nature of self and other positioning. While being sensitive to dynamic qualities of the process of positioning, positioning theory, however, is not focused on the self as the agentic or original source of meaning production. Differently stated, being positioned in a relatively deterministic way, the other does not act as an active agent in the selection, resistance, or revisiting of positions in the self-positioning process. As Davies and Harré (1990, 46) aptly put, “the constitutive force of each discursive practice lies in its provision of subject positions” (in the Foucaultian tradition) that are made available for the other to take up, whereby the other is said to have been positioned. Since the referential and representational aspects of advertisements could also be put to interactional uses, we may examine the impact of English on target audiences by focusing on the self-positioning of them in light of the assignment of English-related cultural values and attributes to the product being advertised that to target audiences are nationally or culturally others.

The self-positioning, it should be added, is more often than not reflexive. This process involves polyphonic events inside the person (e.g., dialogues with imagined others), within which self-positioning presumably takes place. Situated in advertising communication where there is a privileging of a one-way directionality from an ad to the masses, who supposedly receive it and consume it, “the initiative now lies with somebody else rather than the person involved” (Harré and van Langenhove 1991, 402), however, dialogism is suppressed and the ways in which target audiences reflexively position themselves actually are always intentionally forced rather than deliberate. By laying claims to English-related cultural values and attributes assigned to the product, the members of target audiences who are self-positioned indeed are discursively positioned through the strategic use of English.

The asymmetry of the ways in which one claims authority to the self-positioning of the other through discursive practice is particularly useful for explaining why target audiences can be positioned by advertisers with the aid of the English language. However, the constitutive force of English lies not simply in its provision of subject positions available for target audiences to take up, but goes beyond to assign, to shape or probably even to alter their identities. Positioning theory, therefore, provides a useful framework for establishing links between English, positions and power, suggesting its applicability to the examination of influence of English on daily lives of target audiences.

Here, it is necessary to point out that positioning in particular is integrally associated with local normative systems through cultural ideals, which act as guides for persons in a given culture as they position themselves, or culturally available subject positions that are postulated a priori of specific interactions. The emphasis now is on the prerequisite of the self-positioning of target audiences that is shaped by and invoked in the use of English. The potential applicability of positioning theory to examine the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives is enhanced by social particularities of the English language and consumption practices in China, as well as by the fact that advertisements rely on the cultural knowledge and background of target audiences. More specifically, the use of English in Chinese advertising is largely motivated by the common perception of English among Chinese people as the symbol of cosmopolitanism, high technology, modernity, fashion, internationalism, and sophistication (e.g., Gao 2005; Yan 1994). Chinese consumers, whether old or young, with little or no knowledge of English, normally are ready to pay more for a product bearing the cultural values and attributes of English.

3. Data and methodology

This synchronic study is based on data of 357 printed consumer commercials mixed with English, which were collected from eight Chinese magazines (Fashion Lady, Rayli Fashion Beauty, Cosmopolitan Beauty, Rayli Fashion Lady, World Fashion, Auto Fan, Micro Computer, and Computer Fan) and four Chinese newspapers (Beijing Evening News, Guangzhou Daily, Ningbo Evening News, and Southeast Business News) circulated in mainland China during 2007. This was a period of time leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and at that time, the popularity of English in China seemed to have reached a new peak. Therefore, the Chinese–English bilingual advertisements could be an excellent site for the exploration not only of the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives, but also of the local politics of English.

A preliminary quantitative survey of the data revealed the uneven occurrence of English across11 product categories. Listed at the top is technology with approximately 37% of the total, followed by those of real estate and beauty, standing contrast to the other categories, which has a frequency rate of far below 10% (see Table 1). Thanks to the rapid growth of commercial housing in China, the majority of the real estate advertisements were for residential property. Aside from being used as brand name, English was found appearing within and across five structural domains (see Table 2). Headline is the domain where English appears most frequently, followed in order by slogan, body copy, tag,¹ and contact details. A frequency count was conducted to discover structural features of the mix between Chinese and English and their distribution across the headlines and slogans of the technological, real estate, and beauty advertisements. As presented in Table 3, there are four types of structural patterns, among which English-only and bilingual parallel are overwhelmingly more in number than the two others, intersentential and intrasentential (Poplack 1980). Interestingly, this quantitative finding is observed the same as in the study of Gao (2005). English only refers to cases of English usage where a headline or a slogan is entirely in English, while in the case of bilingual parallel both Chinese and its English translation, or vice versa, are entirely or partially copresent. Given the closer connection of the technological, real estate and beauty advertisements to people’s daily lives together with the quantitative findings, this study focuses on the English-only and Chinese–English bilingual headlines and slogans, together with the English brand names, of these advertisements for examining the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives.

As noted earlier, in Chinese advertising, the particular use of English can be hypothesized to comprise more or less implicit ways in the positioning of Chinese people and, simultaneously, in the stylization of their identities (cf. Coupland 2001). Thus, the positioning of Chinese people in advertising becomes part of certain style of affecting Chinese people within the particular use of English. Being linguistically marked or cued, the discursive process of positioning, as pointed out above, could be examined by focusing on the linguistic features of English used. For studying social identities in terms of style, Auer (2007, 12) proposes looking at lexical items, lexical features, structural patterns, rhetorical practices, and so forth. The present study follows this methodological approach to explore the residence of discursive positions with a particular focus on the lexical items and discursive features of English used.

4. Findings: positioning cues and positionings of Chinese people

Analysis of the lexical items and discursive features of English utilized in the headlines, slogans and brand names of the technological, real estate and beauty advertisements revealed five remarkably salient positioning cues that are frequently deployed in positioning Chinese people: proper names of Western places, emotion words, success discourses, and discourses of Western masculinity and femininity. The following analysis will show how these positioning cues are at work in positioning Chinese people by discussing three interrelated processes of locating, refashioning, and assessing Chinese people. It is locating in that English is used for specific effect to discursively set the geographical places in the West as the living place of Chinese people. It is refashioning in the sense not only is English used to enrich but also reinterpret or redefine traditional collective identities of Chinese people. It is assessing in the sense that some features or standards conforming to traditional Chinese ideals are explicitly or implicitly re-evaluated through the process of a comparison. In the discussion that follows each of these tactics will be considered in turn. Examples are selected to illustrate the positioning cues best representing these processes. Among the examples of bilingual headlines, expressions in the official Chinese orthography (i.e., Chinese in character) and Pinyin (i.e., the Chinese phonetic system) are followed by the literal translations which were produced by the researcher. The brand names of products are indicated in brackets and within parentheses contain the literal translation of the original Chinese.

5. Discussion

Analysis of the lexical items and discursive features of the English language that was utilized in a representative sample of Chinese advertisements has revealed a variety of positioning cues that are at work in the process of positioning Chinese people. The processes of locating as well as refashioning Chinese people often simultaneously involve an assessment of them. As has been illustrated, the particularities of English use in Chinese advertising produce at least three implications of importance for the cultural politics of English in China that can also be deployed in the interpretation of the former. First of all, the practice of naming or describing the local properties in English rather than Chinese may serve as a vehicle for global affiliation, allowing China and its people to venture outside of their own national boundaries to seek a related sense of global belonging. This also seems to hold true for the affiliation of Chinese masculinity and beauty criteria for women to their Western counterparts. Secondly, the connection made between the qualities of residential properties and the privileged classes of Britain or notions of royalty through intertextual allusion suggests the attempt of elites in China today to legitimize their newfound status and social standing. This may also be extended to the whole nation, and thus be linked to China’s growing power and its political aspirations on the global stage. Therefore, despite being a foreign language standing for different cultures and values to China and most of its people, English is exploited to build up the national identity of contemporary China as well. Following this, it makes sense to argue that English is utilized in Chinese advertising not for identification but for communication, i.e., a useful instrument for making the nation-state and its people understood in international contexts. Finally, as can be further developed from the two preceding implications, the use of English in Chinese advertising is associated with the context of China’s desire for modernity, and its historical and contemporary relations with the West.

Following Sonntag’s (2003, 114) proposition on the correlation between global integration and the local politics of English, we can also extrapolate that the vastly politicized global English in China might be an indicator of the higher degree of China’s agency and global integration in linguistic globalization with English as one of its defining characteristics. Being highly globally integrated, China has become an actor increasingly politicizing global English in its own context and probably even beyond. As suggested by some sociolinguistic studies of English in China (e.g., S. Li 2015; W. Li 2014), China is not a passive victim of linguistic globalization, but, instead, an active participant resisting the way in which English is utilized to position it and its people by choosing and appropriating English as a counter discourse in the negotiation of local and global identities.

The perception of China in linguistic globalization as a highly globally integrated nation-state suggests further that Chinese people who are confronted with the choices of leading their lives through either Chinese or English are likely to align themselves with different parallel conceptions of being Chinese. This might have produced an implication that China and its people are moving towards being a non-community, raising significant issues as to the threat of English to Chinese cultural identity. Despite the widely accepted recognition of identities being negotiable and transformable; however, the possibility to align with different parallel conceptions of being Chinese does not mean there is a need to subscribe to the point of view that identities of Chinese origin are deemed disposable in this globalizing world. In the case of China, all evidence seems to be to the contrary. Although the massive impact of English in China is certainly felt, the integrity and prosperity of the Chinese language and culture still remain an important issue of language policy (Pan 2011). Therefore, while the findings reported, for instance, on English emotion words and the Western discourses of masculinity and femininity in advertising, seem to indicate that Chinese people are being positioned as Westerners, the use of English in Chinese advertising, and by extension perhaps in all the media of China, seems to bring little threat to the Chinese language and culture. Instead, in an attempt to enter a world system dominated by the Anglophone culture, China, far from weakening its commitment to cultural identity, is becoming more aware of the particularity of its civilization and still remains as “a nation which prides itself on its distinct cultural identity and avowed antagonism towards imperialism” (Adamson 1998, 142). Bhabha (1994) maintains that the demand of non-national culture is a demand not necessary for equality but often for recognition of difference; a demand that opens up a difference within dominant culture itself. There is no threat coming from the semiotic practices of transnational space, architecture or others in Chinese advertising with English mixing, but the fact that they have come to be interpreted as an assimilation of foreign elements by Chinese culture, and not the other way round, strongly suggests that China continues to maintain its self-identity regardless of Western influence. When turning the local medium of advertising with English mixing into their institutional voice, advertisers in China legitimize community norms and, meanwhile, exploit the public celebration of a multifaceted, non-unitary Chinese people as a strategy of local audience retention (Mahootian 2005). For example, one of the ways to assess Chinese people through the intertextual allusion to notions of royalty by the particular use of English actually recalls Chinese meanings of success in association with status and privilege. In this sense, this empirical study to some extent is supportive of Giddens (1991) argument that linguistic reflexivity in late modernity is not necessarily transformative or detraditionalizing but can be at the same time a means of rediscovering a sense of rootedness, thus shapely throwing into question the overemphasis on possibilities for a self-conscious fashioning of identity through English. Since reflexivity is embedded, embodied and contradictory, it is naive to envisage reflexivity as “either some kind of internalized meta-reflection or simplistic liberatory potential against a backdrop of retreating social structure” (Adams 2006, 521). A point that readily follows is that a simple perception of linguistic reflexivity and linguistic globalization amounts to very little if it is detached from its immediate embeddedness in a particular social, cultural, and political context.

6. Conclusion

The pervasiveness of English in China provides a good opportunity for documenting the domains of the spread of English and the local practice of English there, but it is also important to conduct a study of the impact English has on the daily life of local Chinese people. Positioned at the nexus of English, media and identity, this article has addressed from a text linguistic perspective the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives, a topic remaining relatively unexplored in the literature, by answering the question of how Chinese people are positioned through the use of English to mould and define their collective identities. Lexical items of English and its discursive features were set as the sources for the identification of positioning cues, which are drawn upon for the assignment of English-related cultural values and attributes to the products being promoted: values and attributes that Chinese people lay claim to and ascribe to. Analysis of the lexical items and discursive features of the English language that was utilized has revealed the power English wields over moulding and defining the collective identity of Chinese people.

The premise behind this study was the asymmetry of power between advertisers and target audiences. However, this is not meant to declare that positions made available cannot be subject to any negotiation, contestation, revision, or other forms of resistance. Rather than mere viewers, target audiences are usually recognized as active producers of meaning. In order to make the observations and interpretations, which have been made here verifiable, it is advisable for future research to incorporate advertising production and the different levels of reception in terms of age, gender, education, class, and locale into the textual analysis by working directly with advertisers and Chinese people.