I Watch Therefore I Am

In this well-written and engaging book, the author begins with a meticulous investigation of the basic facts of the television advertising industry in China: its institutional lay out, content, and audience. The author Liu Zixu, the deputy editorial director of International Critical Thought, from a Marxian viewpoint and sharp critical eyes, draws upon the distinction made in Chinese television advertising between the working class and what could be called the “watching class,” and suggests that the advertising in contemporary China is fundamentally an ideological apparatus, which educates not only for new life styles but also for a new social order. For that reason, it must be treated as an act of the political—a concept that has not been clearly defined in the existing literature of political economy of communication. The author has carefully reviewed numerous scholarly works both from China and West, when developing his analyses. Shifting the focus towards the very existence of advertising, Liu Zixu discusses the political and ideological conditions and background that have made advertising possible in contemporary China, and look at advertising as a field of ideological and political contention in which socialism and capitalism are in constant struggles. In fact, what the products of the Chinese television advertising industry reveals is the process in which a socialist system hosts capitalism and by so doing becomes its hostage, and in which critical intervention becomes necessary in order to bring socialist relations of production back to the discussion. Liu Zixu, suggests: in this sense, the banal and self-deceptive critique of China’s “communist” authoritarianism as suggested by some domestic and foreign studies doesn’t hold water, while in the meantime we must be cautious about the critique of China’s capitalism, which easily misses the struggles against capitalism by various political forces in China at the state, collective and individual level.