Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Marketing The Chinese Dream Home: Gated Communities And Representations Of The Good Life In (Post-)Socialist Shanghai, Choon-Piew Pow, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper examines the advertising themes and rhetoric that have been assembled in the place-marketing of Shanghai's newly built gated communities. We demonstrate how place-marketing strategies, in this case selling the Chinese dream home, draws upon specific landscape meanings and values that are embedded in Chinese/ Shanghainese history, even as symbolic and cultural capital from the contemporary scene also exert their influences. Collectively, these representations of the good life both reflect and reinforce the exclusivist housing aspirations and privatist visions of middle-class residents of gated communities in contemporary Shanghai. While advertisements do not always achieve the outcomes that property developers …