Most students of cultural studies, Middle Eastern studies or the humanities in general are bound to be familiar with the concept of orientalism, the title of the late Edward Said’s watershed explication of the West’s images and discourse of the east and other non-white peoples. There is also a “mirror-image” phenomenon called occidentalism—the cultural mistranslations and misunderstandings of the West by the East (or again, non-white or non-western peoples in general).
The phenomenon in China is quite apparent in those housing developments, like Thames Town, where luxury townhomes in the suburbs of big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, etc. attempt to replicate the look and “feel” of Western homes. What you get are these strange simulacra, california duplexes, White Houses, Swedish towns complete with church, etc. The other place you notice occidentalism is in theme parks where again, you have architectural simulacra, as well as in Tv/film, especially in those dramas set in the 19th and early 20th c. featuring that de rigeur avatar of Western imperialism, the colonialist white man with the sketchy stache and the goose-bump raising laugh of pure, unadulterated, cultural evil.
I was watching the Olympics and have seen the above Nabel tiles commercial several times. I remember Nabel because they have a huge lighted sign/billboard somewhere in Shanghai which you see from one of the elevated roads. I don’t remember where it is, but I don’t usually see it unless I am on said elevated road, which is not often.
I always thought it interesting: they use this name, associated with dynamite, science, and the lofty ideals of Western intellectual achievement—to sell tiles, of all things. Their English website has the following introduction:
Established in 1992, located in the west suburb of Hangzhou city (which is 200 kilometers away from Shanghai), Hangzhou Nabel Group Co., Ltd, is one of the leading manufacture of the ceramic tile industry in China.
Nabel is a foreign invested enterprise with registered capital of USD 11,610,000
First of all, their Chinese name is still the translation of “Nobel”, but their English name is Nabel. I don’t remember for sure, but I think that at some point in the past their English name was Nobel, perhaps until someone notified them of how unkosher this was.
The commercial above is classic occidentalism: you get these people out of Georgian England—or are they extras from some production of Dangerous Liaisons—bringing in the tiles on trays into the home of some generic Chinese middle-class family. Then they painstakingly lay each tile in. This, of course, demonstrates that in do the values of mass production and economies of scale diminish the attention of craftsmanship and artisanry that you’d expect from these inheritors of the European tradition.
Yes, I know it’s all harmless fun, and it’s TV, why take it seriously. I just find these tropes interesting. Otherwise, there would really be no point in ever turning on Chinese TV.