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Ariel Chen and David Machin

AbstractThe magazine market in China has been changing steadily as global media corporations have brought their international titles into China and as local Chinese titles have had to transform in order to meet the changing market and the arrival of advertising-driven content. This article analyses the changing visual styles, linguistic genres and language styles in the women’s lifestyle magazine Rayli over the past ten years, showing how these increasingly seek to foster identities, ideas and values appropriate to a global culture ideology of consumerism.

Since the Deng reforms of the 1990s, and particularly since China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the media in China have gone through some major changes, evolving from a state-run propaganda system to one increasingly engaging with the global media landscape, both by looking outwards to international markets for media products, and internally through media organisation and imports of products, styles and formats (e.g. see Meng, 1999; Donald and Keane, 2002). Wu (2008) discusses how Chinese television now clearly expresses a global awareness of and readiness for change while at the same time maintaining a practice of West-resistant localisation. Lee (2003) observes the changing patterns of journalistic practice and Wu and Ng (2011) point to Western influences in terms of the kinds of events that are reported, and the stance that is adopted in the reporting of news events. And, crucially, a number of studies show a change in the nature of advertising in China, from emphasising utilitarian aspects to highlighting symbolic, experiential values connected with the use of products (Chung, 2006). Wu (2008: 100) notes that this is part of a pattern where China is increasingly influenced by the ‘global culture-ideology of consumerism’. Feng and Wu (2007) observe that this is a process whereby Chinese values such as Confucianism, Marxism and Maoism are making way for the promotion of Western values such as self-fulfilment and hedonism. In this negotiation of Western elements, Wu (2008: 110) comments on the hybridised use of global and local models, celebrities, settings and artefacts in the presentation of media products Chinese viewers.

It is in the context of this process of the blending of local and global styles, and the increase in advertiser-driven lifestyle culture, that we place this study of the Chinese magazine Rayli, a popular lifestyle publication. The magazine market in China has been changing steadily as globally operating media corporations have brought their international titles into China and local Chinese titles have had to transform in order to meet the changing market and the arrival of advertising-driven content. Despite this shift, there

CHANGING GENRES AND LANGUAGE STYLES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE LIFESTYLE MAGAZINES

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has been very limited research on magazines in contemporary China. Li (2011) points out that global brand magazines have brought to China a new generation of lifestyle magazine journalism through content like interviews; Cheng and Firth (2008), Feng and Karen (2011) and Lee and Song (2012) also offer a discussion of the identities of men and women as they are portrayed in Chinese versions of global magazines through quantitative analysis. Our study seeks to offer a small yet important contribution to this nascent area of research. This article draws on a number of analytical tools from linguistics and the emerging field of multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006) to identify some details of the ways in which the visual and linguistic content of Rayli magazine has been shifting to meet more global, consumer-oriented styles and genres. This approach provides a useful set of tools that allows us to point to the specific details of what are global and what are local identities as presented in this magazine.

Rayli Fashion and Beauty was launched in 1995 by the Rayli Group through a licensing agreement with its Japanese partner, Shufunotomo. The Chinese Rayli Group acquired the Japanese company’s brand and copyright of the content. With a circulation of 1,050,000 and 20.82 per cent market share, Rayli has now been the best selling magazine in mainland China for several years (Cui and Cai, 2012). This article analyses three representative texts as examples from a larger corpus comprising all the editions of the magazine between 2001 and 2012. We argue that the world presented in women’s lifestyle magazines in China is increasingly one that is abstracted from contemporary social issues. It is a world that is highly stylised and individualised, in which empowerment is signified not through concrete actions but through simplistic ‘hot tips’ presented in a confident and fashionable language. However, there is still a sense of collective action and a connection to both immediate social groups and wider Chinese society, along with elements of visual localisation that target the magazine’s market as specifically Chinese.

Media globalisationSince scholars like Schiller (1969) wrote of the negative influence of American media on local cultures, there has been extensive research into and theorisation on the precise nature of these effects. While some authors have agreed with the assessment that describes a kind of cultural imperialism (e.g. Tomlinson, 1997), others have argued for a more complex situation, characterised by proliferating media flows, regional preferences for more local content and a greater overall ‘cultural heterogenisation’ around the globe (Flew, 2007: 163). Other scholars maintain that the complexity and specificity of media and cultural change within a global context suggest the need to ground such generalisations in in-depth empirical research (Drotner, 2004). It is in the spirit of these more complex engagements that it is useful to look at the details of change in magazine style and content at a linguistic and visual level.

A further set of observations upon which we draw comes from scholars who point specifically to the kinds of identities and values promoted by corporate mass media. Mass media provide instruction on citizenship practices within neo-liberal structures and reinforce commercialism (Lewis, 2008; Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Weber, 2009). Through specific advice and behavioural guidance, Western media offer access to symbolic resources, especially in the form of ordinary ‘expert’ knowledge. Lewis (2008: 136) points out that the lifestyle ‘expert’ is ‘increasingly tied to once private and personal sets of concerns and values around the familiar and the domestic’. These analyses foreground the implicit connection between capitalism and cultural citizenship, in which ‘an investment in practices of lifestyle consumption is seen as an investment in the

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“enterprise” citizen-self’ (Lewis, 2008: 137). Meanwhile, Beck (2000: 70) characterises individualism in contemporary society as a landscape in which people are like children lost in a ‘forest of symbols’ mediated through mass media. In a globalised, symbolic world, Beck (2000: 70) asks: ‘Who is the master of these symbols? Who finds (or invents) symbols which, on the one hand, uncover or highlight the structural character of the problems and, on the other hand, make people capable of action?’

Here, we show how a close analysis of changes in visual and language styles and genres in Rayli magazine is one way to reveal how these symbols point to specific ideas, identities and kinds of agency. We identify the presence of, on the one hand, symbols characteristic of the older regime of authoritarianism, which stress rigidly defined roles, and, on the other, symbols that indicate the emergence of the ‘enterprising citizen-self’. The tools we use are drawn from one particular set of studies by linguists on the localisation of the global lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan (Machin and van Leeuwen, 2004, 2005, 2007). These authors developed linguistics-based methodologies by which subtle differences in content can be documented and compared. They show that the international versions of the magazine are localised, but show that this should be viewed as a gloss or ‘local accent’ that overlays a deeper global architecture found in both language style and genre. In what follows, we deploy three of their levels of analysis – ‘visual modality’, genre and language style – to consider how Rayli has changed over a decade. The analysis that follows deals with each of these levels in succession. Every edition of Rayli was examined from 1995 to 2012. We grouped articles into five categories – work, relationships, health, weight-control and general lifestyle – with a view to exploring how, if at all, the representations and communicative strategies of each topic have changed. For this article, we selected example of articles dealing with the topic of work. No articles on work could be found in Rayli before 2000, so we analysed editions of the magazine from 2001. Given the small space here, we analyse in detail three uses of images from 2001, 2005 and 2012 and two text excerpts from 2001 and 2012. These have been chosen as representative of the changes found in the wider corpus.

Visual modalityThe term ‘modality’ refers to the semiotic resources available for indicating the level of truth value to be accorded to communication content such as language or images. Are features the same as or different from those we would have expected to find in a naturalistic setting if we had been there to observe them ourselves (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006)? Are details of the objects and background represented in full detail and focus, or are these reduced? Do aspects of colour such as saturation, modulation and differentiation appear naturalistic, or are they in some way exaggerated? Do light and shadow appear naturalistic?

An example of a photograph that has reduced naturalistic modality is a hypothetical advertising image. Here, details of background may be slightly out of focus, and the modulation of light on clothing and skin may have been reduced to make it appear rounded and softer. The scene may be saturated with diffused light. Colours may be saturated and coordinated across the image and with fonts, borders and perhaps the product itself. This can be contrasted to the higher naturalistic modality of, for example, a documentary photograph. Figures 1–3 show three pages on items related to work from Rayli in 2001, 2005 and 2012. Figure 1 is an item that deals with changing collegial relationships at work; Figure 2 is an item about remaining fresh in your work; Figure 3 looks at how one should best behave at an office party.

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Figure 1: Rayli (2001)

Figure 2: Rayli (2005)

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The two photographs that appear in Figure 1 show real women in actual work settings. The photographs represent the scenes more or less as we would have seen them had we been there at the time. In Figure 2, we see something different. The women are represented in settings that are uncluttered, with several props to indicate that it is a work setting, although the image has most likely been captured in a photographer’s studio. Here, the colour palette is limited to produce a more stylised look. In Figure 3, we also find a reduced naturalistic modality, where the setting is comprised of drawings. The participants are models wearing clothes that are colour coordinated with one another and with the red of the page borders. Although this is only one example, it is typical of the way that representations of work have changed in the magazine – there has been a shift away from naturalistic settings to more idealised, abstract settings that place events in a glamorous world that more closely resembles the world of a fashion shoot or advertisement. This abstraction from the naturalistic world is important, as it permits the kinds of social practices, advice and solutions offered in the magazine to be represented without the complications of a connection with current social issues. It is a kind of fantasy world that resembles an advertisement.

Of course, on another level, what we see represented by the models on the page in terms of clothing and poses would not be typical of a non-Chinese magazine. Women in Western magazines such as Cosmopolitan, even when depicted at work or in relationships, often appear as models striking confident, energetic or seductive poses. The women seen in the 2012 version of Rayli strike poses that suggest innocence, coyness and childishness. If there is seduction, it is not knowing, or it is playful and passive. And it is common to see several women striking the same pose in the same image. This points to the fact that Chinese women’s identities, at least at the visual level, are still anchored in specifically traditional forms of local identities that value

Figure 3: Rayli (2012)

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group membership, collectivity, collaboration and connection with society. The question is whether such details are best accounted for as ‘local’ per se, or as a local gloss that acts as a supplement to global content, as we discuss further in the following analysis.

Linguistic genre The linguistic approach to ‘genre’ is distinct from that of media studies, where the term is used to mean a range of things that often relate to formal conventions as well as the marketing of media products. Here, genre can refer to subject matter (as in ‘science fiction’), the feelings and effects produced by the content (such as ‘thriller’ or ‘comedy’) or its communicative function (as in ‘documentary’). In linguistics, genre is treated as a sequence of social interactions that fulfils specific communicative functions and, importantly, creates specific kinds of relations between the participants. Genre analysis describes what people do to each other through a communicative event and reveals what social relationships this establishes, whether equal, unequal, formal or informal. A conversation is a different genre from a formal public lecture. A lesson in a classroom is generically different from a children’s game. Each creates different relationships between participants in terms of equality and formality, and each fulfils a specific communicative function. The speech will aim to persuade; the game will aim to entertain and create bonding; the lesson will aim to inform. And each involves a sequence of ‘stages’ that participants recognise. The linguist will seek to identify these stages so that they can point out the text’s communicative function and the relationships that are set up.

Longacre (1974) distinguishes four basic categories of linguistic genre. These are rarely found in isolation, but are useful if we think of them as basic building blocks. He identifies the narrative genre, which is primarily about entertainment; the procedural genre, which explains how to do something (such as a recipe); the expository genre, which provides an explanation and interpretation of events (such as a geography book); and the hortatory genre, which seeks to influence people, as in political speeches. Each of these genres has a specific set of identifiable linguistic features and stages. And, as we show, the functions and relations set up by changing forms of genre in Rayli point to the shifting authorial voice of the magazine, and to the different ways in which its texts present the world in terms of communicative function. In such an analysis, it is important to label the functions realised by different parts of the texts. It is through this that we can reveal and identify genre. In the analysis below, we present segments from magazine articles from 2001 and 2012, labelled with their respective function to indicate how this unfolds.

The 2001 text begins with an abstract that summarises the basic idea of the text. This is followed by an orientation segment, which introduces the reader to the fact that, for different generations of workers in China, very different kinds of collegial relationships have existed. It does this by using a quite poetic style. It then moves on to provide a series of case studies of different jobs in which women encounter very different kinds of collegial relationships, presented as complications to be resolved, pointing in each case to the kinds of ideas, values and relationships that characterise the world of work.

The 2001 text makes comparisons between the different eras, to provide a sense of context: from the relative lack of change with fixed and highly prescribed collegial relationships under communism to one of rapid change and increased variety. Analysing the broader body of text that accompanies that brief excerpt shown in Figure 1, it does

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not address ‘you’ in the manner we will see in later examples but rather speaks of a ‘we’. For example:

Now we walk through the metropolitan forest, built of steel and cement, we encounter all kinds of people, all kinds of wonderful and colorful events and we enjoy the fast-moving life day by day.

and

The older generation cannot understand the way that we change job as fast as we change clothes.

The use of we points to a collective experience that is missing from the individualism of consumer capitalism as it is often represented in Western women’s lifestyle magazines.

When the text moves on to case studies, these include a model, a tour guide, a TV editor and an IT worker. Of note in this text, in comparison to the 2012 article we analyse below, is that here we find material social context, different specific work environments and actual individual dispositions and traits. There are also concrete problems to be dealt with, such as where Ying has a young and inexperienced boss.

While the 2001 article offers an element of realism, this piece of exposition is generally upbeat. In this, we can see the arrival of the positive, ‘can do’ world of consumer capitalism. At one point in the text, for example, Ying says ‘say no to work that is not in your own field as this may increase stress’. Yet, in many work environments – particularly in times of layoffs and cost saving – it may simply not be possible to say no. And indeed, none of the case studies involves young women who find themselves in impossible situations. While they all encounter difficulties, these are all satisfactorily resolved.

Table 1: Genre analysis of Rayli (2001) text

Text Genre analysis

Time is changing and everything could change. Age is no longer related to maturity, love unrelated to marriage. Colleagues … Abstract

Ying Qian, 23 years old, IT company employee … is not old but she already has been working for three years … Orientation

There are also frictions sometimes. Ying Qian remembers that on an occasion she had some ‘unhappiness’ with her boss … Complication

Made Ying Qian feel put upon, and she cried … Evaluation

She received an email from the head of department. There was just a simple sentence in it, ‘Let’s talk like in private about work. OK? Resolution

She has learned a lot. Her personality has become smoother and tougher at the same time.

Coda

In terms of genre analysis, what is the communicative function of this text and what kinds of relationships does it set up between interactants? The 2001 text is a typical expository genre. The function is both to inform and entertain, with its combination of exposition and narrative in the case studies, where we find typical stages of the narrative genre such as ‘complication’, ‘reaction’ and ‘resolution’ (Labov, 1972). The

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social relations set up are such that the authorial voice is dominant, providing the interpretation of the events. The case studies are provided as evidence that elaborates the context provided in the opening section.

The 2012 feature is about how to use the annual office party to increase your popularity. This can be characterised as a problem-solution genre. To some extent, this is like the expository genre in that it seeks to explain and provide information. But it is also like the procedural genre in that it explains how to do something. The problem-solution genre deals with what are presented as common problems, such as ‘How to avoid work stress’. Solutions are provided in the form of hot tips. But these tend to be highly generic and abstracted from material social and political contexts. An article on ‘How to avoid work stress’ does not take into account issues like workload, understaffing or juggling two jobs due to being a single parent and meeting mortgage/car payments or bills. Rather, the solutions come in the form of trivial advice such as tidying your desk, aromatherapy or ‘desk yoga’. These are developed with equally decontextualised case studies and expert commentary, and remain at an individualised level. Many involve tips where the woman learns tricks to manipulate others.

Typifying this problem-solution genre, in the Rayli 2012 text, a broader concern is identified: how should we behave at the office party in order to become popular. The article starts with an indication of problems. This is followed by a very short exposition that serves the purpose of placing this issue in a real setting. We also find a warning as to what can go wrong if this problem is not addressed. What follows are repetitions of the problem, the warning and the same solution. What is important here is that the solutions or ‘hot tips’ that are presented are all trivial, yet are presented as insights. These do not involve individual dispositions, nor specific work contexts, but are generic one-size-fits-all strategies.

Table 2: Genre analysis of Rayli (2012) text (1)

Text Genre analysis

What kind of clothes are appropriate?How early should I arrive?So nervous, will I be impolite …?

Problem

Year-end party is the traditional custom of Fukien and Taiwan area. It is held during the period 17–22 December in the lunar calendar. Exposition

On such a special occasion, a tiny thing can change other people’s impression of a new employee, which can make your career smoother the next year – or worse …

Prediction and warning

Ask senior colleagues to choose what you should wear … Solution

The hot tips that are then provided as case studies include ‘Be the person who brings a little joy’; ‘Choose appropriate jokes’; and ‘Use it as an opportunity to chat with the boss’. This item is a different form of exposition, which draws on the stages of the procedural genre and lays out a series of steps. It is a ‘how to’ manual for popularity – although, unlike the procedural genre, these steps are not presented in a linear or sequential order. And, unlike the exposition presented above, this directly addresses the reader, first describing a familiar enough problem that ‘you’ will have, then providing the solution in the form of a relatively unordered list of ‘tips’.

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Table 3: Genre analysis of Rayli (2012) text (2)

Text Genre analysis

Profile; Left, designer, started: 2009I had no idea what to wear to go to the first year-end party …

Problem reformulated in narrative

I asked senior colleagues for advice, went shopping together and picked a formal dress. She said ‘everyone dresses like this’ …

Solution repeated

Ha ha, by the way, a girl who got into the company at the same time as me, because she didn’t know how formal the party was, she over-dressed and became a ‘focus’ person. For a pretty long time after the party, she was what everyone talked about …

Warning repeated in narrative

Rayli reminder: Remember when you go to the company party, elegant but cute is the ‘king’s way’ … Maxim

If you don’t know what to wear, it is not embarrassing to ask for advice from colleagues. They will be happy to give you some suggestions, and by doing so you can become closer to them …

Solution repeated

Importantly, these tips are abstracted from any particular set of circumstances or individual dispositions. They position the individual as acting alone and strategically against others. For example, a girl in one of the case studies laughs at the colleague who was over-dressed at the office party. In the earlier text, there was a sense of belonging and cooperation that is missing from the problem-solution hot tips that characterise these later issues of the magazine.

So what is the function of this text, and what kinds of social relations are set up? The function of advertising is to persuade readers or viewers to do or think certain things. This genre does the same. Importantly, the emphasis is not so much on the specific behaviour described by the hot tips as much as the value of the attitudes and identities of persons acting alone, strategically and confidently that these texts signify. The aim of these magazines is to signify a world of agency and fun. Just as a beer can be branded and can signify values of friendship, or a car can signify the values of freedom, with both encouraging consumers to align themselves with these values through acts of their consumption, so the language of magazines associates itself with the values of fun and agency, with which the readers can align themselves by purchasing the right clothing, accessories and makeup. The problem-solution format helps to create a ‘can do’ attitude, and a sense that the world of glamour, fashion and products presented by the magazine is one of positive identities, values and ideas.

Language style The language style in the 2001 text contains many characteristics of expositional texts in general. We find sentences that present information as accepted facts, such as ‘Age is no longer related to maturity’ and ‘The older generation cannot understand the way that we change job as fast as we change clothes’. We find definitions such as ‘Time is a miracle magician’. We find classifications, as in the first paragraph, where the collegial relationships of each era are distinguished. We also find cause and effect described – for example, in the reasons we are offered for the older generation’s realisation that their relationships with colleagues were ‘plain as water’. What is most important for

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our analysis here, however, is showing what has been added in the later editions. We found that texts after 2005 increasingly use a language style that has much in common with that of advertising: direct address, personal pronouns and colloquialisms.

While the earlier text on collegial relations uses impersonal address – as in ‘Time is changing and everything could change’ – and on occasion suggests a sense of shared experience – as in the sentence ‘For people in our generation the relationships with colleagues have become a vital component of life’ – the office party text from 2012 uses a much more personal and direct form of address. In the first place, we find extensive use of the second-person pronoun, as in ‘Remember when you go to the company party’, ‘If you don’t know what to wear’ and ‘so you can become closer to them’. These usages create a greater bond and sense of intimacy between the magazine and the reader. While the reader is being offered hot tips by an expert, this expert cares about and understands ‘you’. ‘You’ are not being informed by an aloof, formal authority, as was the case in the 2001 article, but rather engaged with personally and individually. The face of consumer capitalism is not distant and impersonal but understands you.

Direct address is also achieved through the use of imperatives (where a sentence starts with a verb to give a command) as in ‘Remember when you go to the company party, elegant but cute is the “king’s way”’. In other hot tips, you are instructed to ‘[o]bserve the interpersonal relationships around you’ and ‘Don’t be rude and join in the conversation properly’. These imperatives allow the magazine’s voice to present itself as expert. But they also create a sense of energy, forthrightness and confidence in these texts. These directives are simply not present in the earlier versions of the magazine.

We also find changes from older language forms to those that are more fashionable and up to date. Until 2005, the use of chengyu (traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions that consist of four characters) was common. Chengyu are mostly derived from ancient Chinese literature, and linked with myths or historical facts; they do not follow the grammatical structure and syntax of modern Chinese speech. The use of chengyu creates a feeling of formality, authority and officialdom. From 2005 onwards, chengyu are found much less. Rather, the 2012 text uses a lexicon of ‘street vocabulary’ or trendy language. This is in the form of English terms, where ‘boss’, ‘party’, ‘over’, ‘point’, ‘profile’ and ‘hold’ are used – young, educated people in China currently mix simple English words into their sentences when chatting to demonstrate that they are Westernised and up to date. Other street terms and slang like ‘sing K’, ‘K song’ (both mean going to Karaoke), saliva songs (songs that everyone knows) and ‘king’s way’ (the best/right thing to do) are also present.

What we find, therefore, is that Rayli delivers its values at the level of language style, which helps to connote the specific ideas and attitudes of confidence, go-getting and modernity. While the older magazines use styles more oriented to providing information or of storytelling, the newer style – which appears even in features and editorials – is more like the language of advertising. It is a language style that is fun, energetic and highly personal. The new style is one that merges the lives of women with the world of commercial advertising and the identities and values it favours. Yet it is a language style that nonetheless – albeit increasingly less often – sits alongside older kinds of storytelling, where women are depicted as existing in systems of interpersonal and familial relationships that include elements of responsibility and collective goals above and beyond the abstraction of ‘getting ahead’.

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ConclusionWhile Chinese media are still defined by the country’s social and political environment, it is evident that on one level the transition to identities suitable for consumer capitalism is well advanced. The content of lifestyle magazines like Rayli offers young women a glamorous world where they act strategically and fashionably as individuals. This is a world that very much resembles that of an advertisement or fashion shoot. It is a world of confidence and forthrightness, yet at the same time it is oriented towards trivial and petty concerns. This is not a world of social responsibility or political agency, but a neo-liberal world of enterprising selfhood and consumer-based individualism, where the tools of the trade are makeup, fashion, accessories and comportment. The only ‘reality’ in this world is the products themselves. The language choices and visual designs in magazines have become symbols that serve the interests of consumer capitalism in China. In the words of Beck (2000: 66):

[W]hat people dream, how they would like to be, their everyday utopias of happiness – these are no longer tied to a particular geographical area and its cultural identities … [it is] linked into the symbolic circuits of global culture industry.

Elements of more locally specific Chinese identities can still be found in the form of fashion preferences, models and poses, along with – especially in the earlier issues of the magazine – a lingering sense of identity being subsumed by the collective. But these may increasingly be thought of as a surface gloss that lies over the symbolic architecture of consumer capitalism.

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Ariel Chen is a postgraduate researcher in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.

David Machin is a Reader in Journalism, School of Arts, Brunel University, United Kingdom.