This seems to be a borderline case of "oriental romanticism". Some Chinese fishermen do actually train cormorants to fish for them... which is pretty cool and probably has few modern corollaries. Comparable to romanticizing a cowboy and his steed or a falconer hunting with a bird, which are human-nature connections in western traditions.

But to follow your thesis, I wonder if this commercial would've worked just as well if the "modern" fisherman was also Asian...

Young White Man = "You", always.

I think it's worth noting, too, that HSBC is a Hong Kong bank, so the imagery of Chinese wisdom helping the failing white man translates to Chinese banking wisdom helping the bankrupt "West".

I live in China and was in Guilin just a few months ago. I saw those cormorant fishermen- but they don't fish for themselves anymore. Pollution, industrialization and a huge shift towards the tourism industry in that region have pretty much finished off fishing for a living around there. They now pose in tourist streets for money, letting people take pictures with the birds. They also do nightly cormorant fishing demos for tour groups. The example they show in that ad is almost ludicrous in both the exotification of the 'Wise Oriental' and in the complete denial of their reality.

On the other hand,I would expect the Chinese to be more closely connected to their traditions than, say, I am (white guy from midwestern suburb....). Though, yes, that point is a bit too exoticized here.

But another dynamic here worth mentioning: the ad does puncture the inflated "Western" sense of technical superiority that has often accompanied the encounters between the "west" and the rest. How many times in the last 500 years have white men arrived around the world, sussed out the situation and decided the locals were were backwards and needed to have their technologies improved? This often involves telling people from a culture that has been growing a crop for thousands that WE know better than THEY do how to grow that crop, sometimes with disastrous results, when unsuitable agribusiness strains are introduced and local strains are wiped out. A particularly famous example of this sort of thing: USAID decided in the 1980s that Haiti should have better pigs. Turns out the "better" pigs didn't survive so well outside of Iowa, and Haitian families found themselves without a major source of protein. Acknowledging and respecting local knowledge can be a good thing!

This is also a case of lazy advertising creatives. They obviously just got through watching BBC's Wild China, which includes a lengthy segment on cormorant fishing, and were "inspired".

I blogged about it some time ago: http://workthatmatters.blogspot.com/2010/03/too-close-for-comfort.html?showComment=1269306329854

The interesting thing is that the ad version left out the noose...

I think some of the stereotypes found here are more in the eyes of the observer than in the ad itself. However, what I find really interesting is the likely unintentional metaphor (which is also in the eyes of the observer) of how the bank shows up and take the fisherman's means of fishing.

He shows up there, sees that crazy efficient way of fishing and straight up takes from the guy, or worse yet, makes the guy give it to him.

"Simultaneously, it erases Chinese modernity, fixing China somewhere back in time."

I'm having a difficult time understanding the above.

What does "Chinese modernity" mean?

How can a forty-second commercial "erase" it?

Since the term "modernity" as applied to Western nations would appear to have little to do with China, I'll assume Lisa *might* be referring to something that began after the end of the Qing dynasty and the advent of the Republic of China.

For simplicity's sake, I'll assume that Lisa's "Chinese modernity" includes all events and developments in China since the birth of the Republic until the time when this commercial was made.

Although I've no academic familiarity with Chinese history, it seems to me that a great many things potentially evident of, or reflecting, "Chinese modernity" occurred during this period; moreover, these things involved well over one billion people and were played out over a land mass of some 3.7 million square miles.

Given the vastness of the terrain, population, number of events potentially evident of "Chinese modernity," and the sheer complexity of these events, I'm curious as to *precisely* how a 40-second commercial might "erase Chinese modernity."

Is this something accomplished with a magic wand?

Or is it achieved via incantation, spell, animal sacrifice, curse, or prayer?

Or is it a secret?

What does "Chinese modernity" mean in the context of China's 60-odd ethnic minorities, many of whom are only barely, if at all, incorporated into the nation's formal economy and whose day-to-day lives are defined by folkways, beliefs, and agricultural practices rather distant from "modernity," however you might slice it.

Does any mass-media representation of these peoples serve to "erase Chinese modernity," too?

Maybe one way of avoiding this conflict would be to arbitrarily define these peoples as "non-Chinese" (some of them might agree with this), or at least somehow require them to eschew their "romantic" native attire for bespoke unisex jumpsuits designed and produced by Shanghai Tang (some of them might object to this).

At any rate, who knew that sociology was a discipline so readily indulgent of the magical and the spooky?

Hi were doing A school project on ancient china,and have had no help on any of these websites on the sociology part. If you have any useful info could you please email it to me??? im only in form 2 so something i could acually understand please???