Americans who still think of Asians as primarily having "exotic" or traditional "oriental" values might be stuck in the 20th century.

Researchers at Rice University in Houston are in search of a more contemporary — and accurate — perspective on Asian culture, and they believe it can be found in the messages conveyed through advertising there.

With a three-year $150,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, Steven Lewis, Benjamin Lee and Richard Smith are researching how civil society is marketed in a transnational China.

"The rapidly increasing circulation of people, commodities, technologies and ideas among Chinese societies made possible by globalization is changing Chinese culture in fundamental ways," said Lewis, senior researcher for the Transnational China Project (TCP) at Rice's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Lee, a professor of anthropology, Smith, the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities in the Department of History, and Lewis lead the TCP as part of a broader, interdisciplinary effort to explore the changes in contemporary culture caused by globalization.

"With the end of Cold War rivalries and the opening up of China, distinctly transnational Chinese middle and upper classes are emerging," said Lewis.

Smith, a historian, agrees. "This pioneering research, spearheaded by Dr. Lewis, has prompted me to think far more carefully about the relationship between public images and personal identity, not only in modern and contemporary China, but in premodern China as well," Smith said.

Lewis is intrigued by the changes he has observed in ads geared toward the "jet-setting Chinese middle class" and wonders whether the new lifestyle advertising campaigns could result in political identities that are no longer national.

A traditional ad for a sports drink, for example, might picture national gymnastics athletes in front of a Chinese flag, appealing to nationalism and suggesting that people should buy the drink because all Chinese people use the product.

A more trendy ad for an airline, however, might feature a young, affluent Chinese couple eating Italian pasta, watching an American movie and getting ready to fly off to Bali. Rather than emphasize such traditional values as hard work and perseverance, the ad appeals to a lifestyle that embraces cultural products from all around the world and implies that a more modern person is not afraid to try things outside the country.

For the research, the three have collected several thousand images of billboard-like ads found in the subway stations of Beijing, Fukuoka, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei and Tokyo. Those ads have been translated and coded by Rice undergraduate student Michelle Lin (class of 2001) and Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management student Arthur Yan (class of 2003). Baker Institute research intern David Ho (class of 2002) has also provided background research on Chinese advertising and survey research firms.

Because the ads are useful for student analysis of changing values in Chinese societies, Shisha van Horn in Rice’s Classroom Technologies Services is constructing an interactive archive of the images that will help Lewis in teaching an experimental seminar this semester called "Transnational China."

After the archive and database are constructed, Lewis, Lee and Smith will contact the individuals and companies that produced the ads to determine what their intentions were, including the values honored by the ads and their relation to nationalism. The final portion of the three-year project will entail surveying consumers in China to determine whether and how they may have been influenced by the ad campaigns. The analysis will be conducted by Rice faculty and scholars at institutions that are part of the TCP’s network: the University of Hong Kong, National Tsinghua University, MIT, and the Chinese and Shanghai academies of Social Sciences.

Lewis noted that Westerners in general seem to forget that 75 years ago, during the era of globalization and rapid circulation among Asian societies, the great cosmopolitan centers of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo were created; instead, they think about the five decades of isolation of populations under the great nation states during the worldwide economic depression, colonialism and war.

"Now we have returned to a period of looser boundaries and much interaction among societies in Asia," Lewis said. Smart advertisers are well-aware of that change, as evidenced by campaigns that target a new generation of "Pan-Asian" young people who identify less with national culture and more with middle-class, transnational tastes and preferences--a blend of European, Asian and American values, Lewis added.

If such advertising efforts are effective, "the ability of nation states to mobilize populations for economic development, international conflict and other causes will be affected," he said.

"We were awarded this grant because we were able to show the Luce Foundation that interdisciplinary research and pedagogy are a hallmark of Rice and the Baker Institute," Lewis said. "Unlike most larger universities, Rice can quickly form informal groups of faculty to pioneer collective research."

The Henry Luce Foundation, established in 1936 by the late Henry R. Luce, co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc., supports programs focusing on American art, East Asia, higher education, theology, public policy and the environment, and women in science and engineering. The foundation is supporting this research by Rice faculty to help Americans better understand how globalization is affecting traditional notions of national and collective identity in China and other parts of Asia.

More information on the TCP’s research and pedagogical support programs can be found on the project’s award-winning, bilingual Web site, <www.ruf.rice.edu/~tnchina/>.

NOTE: The Transnational China Project would also like to to thank the many staff of Rice University departments for their help in applying to the Luce Foundation, including the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the Development Office (and Katie Cervenka in particular), and the staff of the Baker Institute for Public Policy.

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