▲ PEOPLE’S DAILY (RENMIN RIBAO) 10 March 1960, page 7. Advertisements for various medicinal products. (Image courtesy of 人民日报图文数据库 Renmin Ribao Tuwen Shujuku [Renmin Ribao Picture and Text Database])

To some observers, advertisements such as the ones above would appear to represent a massive contradiction between socialist theory and capitalist market mechanisms for selling goods. But those familiar with the genre recognize that socialist newspapers, in a variety of geographic contexts, have always flirted with market-style advertising as a means to subsidize newspaper production. Since 1948, China’s leading socialist newspaper and propaganda organ of the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), regularly featured advertisements for a variety of goods and services that reflected the needs, aspirations, and desires of socialist producers and consumers alike. Throughout the early high socialist period (1949–1966), the People’s Daily published a quarter to half page section, usually on page four, five, or six of an eight-page issue, which featured everything from high quality pens to aluminium welding rods, from typewriter ribbons to voltage meters, from socialist periodicals to propaganda art posters, from air conditioning units to gramophone records, and a dizzying variety of products and services in between.

Despite the fascinating tension between socialist theory and capitalist practices embodied by the wide range of advertisements published during the high socialist period, research on advertisements in the People’s Daily is almost nonexistent. Identifying that advertisements were in fact published regularly in the People’s Daily provides us a useful tool for a variety of historical inquiries, especially as a means to identifying the readership of such newspapers in a state where sales numbers, distribution patterns, and consumer polls are nearly impossible to identify or access. These advertisements can also highlight the sanction of certain cultural values by the state, and help investigate the function of needs and desires within both real and imagined socialist marketplaces.

Socialist advertisements in the People’s Daily from 1949–1966 often targeted Chinese Communist Party cadres, urban intellectuals, and urban-industrial danwei (work unit) bosses or staff. The advertised products suggest a readership of white-collar workers and industrial work unit leaders with a moderate to high level of education and a degree of either institutional or personal purchasing power. The location of certain advertisers’ businesses, especially advertisements of film screening times at local movie theatres across Beijing, also point towards a general geography of readership in and around the Beijing metropolitan area. ^[1] This audience was made up of the kind of educated, urban Chinese citizens who had an office that might benefit from air conditioning units or high quality typewriter ribbon, or those who ran factories and thus may have required aluminium welding rods, industrial acids, or equipment to measure electrical voltage, or indeed those who had the disposable income necessary to attend a local film screening. ^[2] By more clearly defining the audience of the People’s Daily, we can begin to appreciate the limits of Chinese media systems, and ground the effects on local populations in terms of actual readership rather than the imagined effects of this larger-than-life newspaper.

▲ PEOPLE’S DAILY (RENMIN RIBAO) 1 May 1958. Left: page 4. Notice the Gold Star as a ‘brand’, both in name (金星 jinxing) and image (the gold star with line, top left). Also note the ‘tag’ on the pen which states ‘1958 New Item’, situating the product in a clear timeline demarcating the past, present, and future. Right: page 6. Advertisement for ‘Laika’ brand Soviet cigarettes.(Images courtesy of 人民日报图文数据库 Renmin Ribao Tuwen Shujuku [Renmin Ribao Picture and Text Database])

On 15 September 1948, just over a year before the official establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the People’s Daily ran a headline article on how to purchase advertisements in the newspaper. Speaking to potential advertisers, the article titled ‘Advertising Examples’ stated ‘This paper publishes all kinds of advertisements...’ and listed the pricing of advertisements per day and even discounts for long-term advertisers. Later evidence after the establishment of the PRC in 1949 suggests that the People’s Daily may have transitioned to free advertisement for certain state-run enterprises and ‘state run cultural publishing agencies’, but the existence of a fee-collecting advertising apparatus at the newspaper also remained.

A wide variety of producers were soon purchasing this advertising space, potentially selling their goods or services to the millions of daily readers of the People’s Daily. One demographic that these producers clearly targeted throughout the fluctuating political conditions of the 1950s and 60s was the urban-clerical level of Chinese socialist society. Products directed towards this market included ‘Gold Star’ brand iridium pointed pens, ‘Daybreak’ brand typewriter ribbon, ‘Laika’ brand Soviet cigarettes, and personal air conditioning units. These clerical materials, or materials fitted to an office environment and urban lifestyle, included practical stenographical items (pens, typewriter ribbons) as well as luxuries that represented a few immediate consumables and durables of Chinese office workers (imported cigarettes, air conditioning).

Michael Schudson’s study of early American newspaper culture notes that newspaper content was often less representative of the lived experiences of consumers than it was of their collective dreams and desires. ^[3] The pens, branded typewriter ribbon, imported cigarettes, and air conditioning units advertised in the People’s Daily represent a mix of potential aspirations among the clerical reading audiences. Throughout 1958, office staff across China were constantly exposed to news about the second Five Year Plan, later officially designated as the ‘Great Leap Forward’. As these individuals read the newspaper between 1956–1958, they witnessed through the news (supposed) astronomical leaps in agricultural and heavy industry production, constant technological invention and innovation, the heroic performances of ingenious men and women working to speed up socialist construction, and China’s march to ‘overtake Britain in fifteen years’ in coal production and other industries.

The ‘Gold Star’ pen advertisement aligned perfectly with the ‘Great Leap’ themed aspirations and collective desires of office workers in the PRC. The astronomical reference to a ‘Gold Star’ may have been designed to evoke in Chinese audiences thoughts of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite and the product of socialist technological innovation that was mentioned constantly in Chinese news reporting and propaganda. The advertised ‘iridium point’ of the pen would also have been seen as cutting edge, as iridium pens were prized for their use of the world’s hardest and densest metal at room temperature, and were named after Iris, the Greek goddess of rainbows (for iridium’s polychromatic reflections under certain conditions). The company advertised such futuristic technology in tandem with the pen’s novelty status and situation in time as a ‘1958 New Product’. As news stories during the ‘Great Leap’ period praised the constant inventions and innovation of the working class, from fertilizer compositions to steel production methods to agricultural technologies, the denotation of ‘new’ futuristic products would have been all the rage. Products such as the ‘Gold Star’ pen may have appealed to a stenographical class who did not directly take part in the industrial-agricultural worker’s production push of the Great Leap Forward, but could symbolically participate in the aesthetic of futurism through the technology and novelty advertised in products like the pen.

In line with the modern and global aesthetic of consumer goods listed above, an advertisement for ‘Laika’ brand Soviet cigarettes served the purpose of offering futuristic and global items of consumption for individual consumers. First, the ‘Laika’ brand was designed to evoke Soviet modernity and achievement through reference to Laika, the first dog sent into space by Soviet engineers in November of 1957. In addition, the cigarette was advertised as a ‘May 1st Gift’, evoking the symbolism of global labor day for Chinese audiences as a means of selling the idea of socialist brotherhood to consumers. Finally, the packaging is marked with the same ‘new product’ moniker as the earlier instance of the pen, evoking the new inventions and innovation aesthetic of the Great Leap Forward.

▲ PEOPLE’S DAILY (RENMIN RIBAO) 3 May 1958, page 6. Advertisement for potentiometers from the ‘Great China Instrument and Meter Factory’. Note the range of products advertised, showcasing to potential consumers that the company could meet a variety of industrial needs. (Image courtesy of 人民日报图文数据库 Renmin Ribao Tuwen Shujuku [Renmin Ribao Picture and Text Database])

Another popular genre of advertisements in the People’s Daily dealt with industrial materials. These products included bottled hydrogen, potentiometers (measure voltage), aluminium welding rods, slag wool (a type of fibreglass-like insulation), particle board, heavy duty detergents, industrial acids, and sodium silicate (an industrial varnish). ^[4] All such items had industrial applications. Bottled hydrogen could be used in oil refineries, potentiometers to test and manage electrical equipment, aluminium welding rods to cut and arrange steel or other metals, slag wool and particle board for construction projects, detergents for cleaning industrial machines, acids for refining oil and fertilizers, and sodium silicate for finishing a wide variety of light consumer durables. And beyond these specific applications, readers were encouraged by the advertisements to inquire with the advertising businesses for access to more information, including catalogues, which would allow them to locate the exact products that fit their needs.

▲ PEOPLE’S DAILY (RENMIN RIBAO) 16 February 1960, page 7. A Guiyang company sells a variety of pipes through striking imagery, creative fonts, and an offer of ‘machined parts, low prices’. Notice the prominent drawings which illustrate the variety of piping this particular company carries, from ‘wide mouth’ pipes to U-shaped and T-shaped fittings. (Image courtesy of 人民日报图文数据库 Renmin Ribao Tuwen Shujuku [Renmin Ribao Picture and Text Database])

Since few private individuals would have had the equipment necessary to use bottled hydrogen, potentiometers, welding rods, industrial detergents, and other chemical compounds, it is safe to assume that these advertisements were targeted at danwei (work unit) leaders who could order such materials for their own industrial work units using the phone numbers and addresses provided in advertisements. Under the socialist framework where manufactured technical products were difficult to obtain due to the shortages wrought by command economies, newspaper advertisements could provide a solution to danwei leaders searching for particular materials and spare parts. According to socialist business histories, these work unit leaders would often ‘send off letters’ to anyone they hoped could provide the material necessary for getting machinery up and running at the difficult-to-maintain experimental production facilities they managed. Such individuals faced constant shortages of necessary materials while tasked with solving complicated local issues, managing projects that spanned poorly planned water irrigation projects, hasty construction of small-scale power plants, food spoilage in shipping agricultural products etc. ^[5] These advertisement networks may have helped provide a much needed support system and technical safety net.

Jackson Lear in his study of the history of American advertising culture notes that advertising promoted ‘the creation of a symbolic universe where certain cultural values were sanctioned and others were rendered marginal or invisible’. It may be difficult for some readers to imagine the symbolic cultural universe of China in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but these newspaper advertisements give us some clues. They render a symbolic universe of the limited readership of the People’s Daily, well-to-do industrial, clerical, or bureaucratic urbanites in and around the Beijing area who sought to both carry out ‘socialist construction’ while also enjoying some of the fruits of this labour. The world-views sponsored by the People’s Daily, and potentially reflected among this limited population of individuals, can help refine our own understanding of who exactly interacted with this supposed ‘propaganda machine’.

Notes and references

[1] Businesses from Guangzhou, Shanghai, Yunnan, and many other provinces bought advertising space in the People’s Daily. However, the vast majority of advertisements for local services, such as film screening times, reflect a Beijing readership.

[2] People’s Daily: 1 May 1958, 6; 3 May 1958, 6; 5 February 1959, 8.

[3] Michael Schudson, Discovering the news: a social history of American newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 101.

[4] People’s Daily: 1 May 1958, 6; 3 May 1958, 6; 5 May 1958, 6; 22 September 1958, 4; 4 January 1962, 4.

[5] Philip Scranton, Enterprise, organization, and technology in China: a socialist experiment, 1950–1971 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 86–87, 184–186, 287–288. See also, Calvin Chen, Some Assembly required: work community, and politics in China’s rural enterprises (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008).

DONALD SANTACATERINA is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research investigates the various informational ecosystems created through national news production, local and provincial newspaper cultures, localized news dissemination techniques, and global propaganda institutions’ role in shaping domestic Chinese propaganda cultures. His research also leverages ‘sinological garbology’ to acquire difficult-to-locate historical documents in flea markets and rare book shops, to challenge the narratives of traditional repositories of historical information, like state-controlled archives.