Marketing the Chinese Dream Home: Gated Communities and Representations of the Good Life in (Post-)Socialist Shanghai

• Main Authors: Pow, Choon-Piew, Kong, Lily
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2007
• Subjects: Chinese middle class; Gated communities; Place-marketing; Shanghai; The good life; Cultural landscape; Marketing; Strategic approach; Tourism market; Tourist destination; Urban development; Urban housing; Asian Studies; Human Geography; Urban Studies
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1790; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3047/viewcontent/Marketing_Chinese_Dream_Home_Gated_Communities_Shanghai_2007.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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 wish for, there is no doubt that they play significant roles in both shaping and reflecting landscape meanings and values. As medium and outcome, they reveal the growing aspirations of a new Chinese middle class. Copyright © 2007 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.