University of California-Davis doctoral student Doris Duangboudda, under the guidance of Dr. Li Zhang, will investigate how auto designers plan auto shows in an effort to create consumer demand among middle class families in China. The research will be conducted in Shanghai, a major site for automobile production and consumption in the country, as well as host of the national auto show (which alternates annually with Beijing). The need for China's export-oriented economy to be domestically driven, coupled with a greater dependence of declining world economies on the Chinese market, requires serious examination of how consumer demand is created. As car consumption has become a central focus of government and corporate marketing initiatives, auto shows take on heightened importance. The objective of this research is to identify the ways in which designers mediate state and corporate engagement in postsocialist countries, and offer new insights into how China's mass consumption might transform global markets.
Doris Duangboudda will employ multiple social science methods, including formal interviews and participant-observation, to obtain empirical data from government officials, corporate representatives, auto show designers, and middle class families and individuals. This project contrasts the multiple interests of national and municipal levels of government and domestic and foreign corporate entities in creating consumer demand at auto shows. This project also evaluates how families and individuals interpret and implement ideas about middle class lifestyles derived from auto shows in their daily lives.
This research will contribute to the understanding of consumption and class formation in a postsocialist context. By identifying potentially changing consumption patterns, this study seeks to produce new conceptual tools to look at the how consumption might be institutionalized as a part of everyday life. This research will also empirically link consumption with national identity formation and global economic flows and provide information that could be valuable to US industry. Funding this research also strengthens international scholarly collaborations with China and supports the education of a graduate student.
This project examined China’s mass car consumption and emerging car culture amidst ongoing postsocialist transformations in Shanghai and the surrounding area. No longer the domain of government officials or the very wealthy, cars offer not only unprecedented mobility for the emerging middle classes in their everyday lives, but shape new forms of urban social life and aspirations. Findings from this project are largely based on qualitative data drawn from participant observation and interviews with people involved in auto marketing and advertising efforts, as well as from participant observation and interviews with families and individual car owners or potential car owners. While cars are in high demand throughout the country, this project is premised on the idea that creating consumer demand is an ongoing effort. This is particularly salient in a country with an emerging middle class, a high savings rate, and fewer institutions promoting (and often distrust of) loans or credit for car consumption. With this in mind, this research identified various ways that marketers and advertisers connect with car consumers to learn their preferences and shape desires so that consumption becomes a more habitual way of life. While car consumers very quickly adapt cars into their lives, cars in turn alter or enhance their leisure time, business, and family life, particularly aspirations for their only child. Despite mass car consumption being a very new phenomenon, cars are often considered ‘normal,’ something that ‘everyone has,’ and receive little attention over more immediate anxieties concerning housing, education, career prospects, and food quality. Even so, unlike other consumer items, cars, very simply by the fact they are out on the streets for all to see, are a clear, public marker of emerging classes and shifting social relations. How marketers and advertisers engage with the public, and how the public learns to channel their desires are important to understand the ways consumption comes to be institutionalized. This study on mass car consumption in postsocialist China offers insight into changing global flows concerning capital, commodities, expertise, and media. It also provides insight into how emerging middle classes perform citizenship as new consumers.
