After Four Years in China, I Really Haven’t Missed Political Ads
And I haven’t figured out how to explain it to my students, either.
The first time I lived in China, I made a willing decision to cut myself off from popular culture. It was a sensible decision. I missed the entire insufferable “There’s an app for that” advertising campaign, and that’s just fine by me.
On my most recent trip — which proved to be the longest by a solid margin — I made no such decision. Apart from the innate difficulties in accessing foreign news through national censorship, I lived a life that was as close to routine as possible.
For the most part, this worked out for me. But there was one exception to this: I didn’t see any political advertising at all for more than four years. That’s fine by me, too.
I can remember the last time I saw a political ad. It was in Spring of 2018 and I was sitting in a hotel restaurant in Chicago, there on one of the various and sundry pointless errands that the Chinese government makes you run when you decide to relocate there. As I ate my Neapolitan-style pizza, I spotted an attack ad on one of the TVs above me. Being that I didn’t grow up in Illinois, I had no clue what this ad was about. It’s the best frame of mind to watch such an ad, I think — a state of gentle…
