Professor Karl Gerth of Oxford University gave a Lecture titled Exploration of the Consumer Culture in Contemporary China from a historical Perspective on the invitation of our Simian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities in the afternoon of December 17th.
Karl Gerth was given his doctoral degree by the Department of History of Harvard University, supervised by the famous Professor Kong Feili. He had taught in the Department of History of South Carolina University and been in charge of its East Asia Research Centre. 2 years ago, he went to Oxford University. And he now is an associate professor in the History Department of Merton College of Oxford.
During the lecture, Professor Gerth began his topic from his first book China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, and then elaborated on the complicated relationship between consumer culture in the Republican Period and the creation of the nation. He thought that under the ideological construction of the nation, the consumer culture would be coded and symbolized. The images of the female, the patriotically entrepreneur and national products were influenced by nationalism. And behind the ideologies of the nations came the domains of various interest groups. The integration of nationalism and consumerism became the basis of the “modern China”.
In the end, he talked about the features of current Chinese society and consumer culture, and some contents of the research on the Chinese consumer culture in the 1950s.
