The construction of a consumer population in advertising in 1920s China

<jats:p> Advertising in early 20th-century China played a central role in turning Chinese people into consumers. Advertisements between 1921 and 1929 in Shenbao, one of the most influential newspapers ever published in China, were studied to identify discourses of gender within the overarching discourse of Chinese people as a consumer population. Four discursive formations were identified: (1) female and male as ungendered categories of the consumer population, (2) woman and man as citizens of China, (3) one happy family as a consumption unit, and (4) women as a special group of consumers. </jats:p>