Western Culture Marketing at Tsinghua

I recently received a pretty gold card from "Tsinghua University English 01 and China Radio International" to "cordially invite me to ... a Celine Dion Album Release Party" on April 17 in the Multifunctional Hall of Tsinghua's Meng Minwei Building.

What I found there was a packed theatre where people were passively sitting and watching a series of Dion videos.

A "party", as the American Heritage Dictionary states, is "a social gathering especially for pleasure or amusement (for example, a cocktail party)," or "a group of people who have gathered to participate in an activity." It is not a bunch of people sitting watching videos, unsocially, with no interaction amongst themselves.

The word "party" is therefore deceiving. And whether they know it or not, Tsinghua University English 01, China Radio International, and all those in attendance at this "party" were participants in a worldwide corporate marketing scheme peddling an unwholesome approach to life.

The noxious message promoted by this false use of the word "party" and by events like the Dion promotion has been described by the writer Bill McKibben. It encourages you to experience the world "entirely secondhand" and to "replace your own reality with someone else's mass-produced version." Ultimately, what is being promoted is materialism.

McKibben writes:

What is materialism? It is, beyond the point of basic sufficiency and comfort, nothing more than the search for fulfillment in all the wrong places. Americans in the mid-1980's spent more hours shopping than their counterparts in the then-Soviet Union, bread lines notwithstanding. The very fact that it is an endless search, that no possession satisfies more than momentarily, proves that it is not about the needs in our lives but the needs in our souls.

See McKibben's full essay: The Age of Living Vicariously