Advertising strategies and glocal cultures. A case study: Absolut Vodka in the Chinese market

III Introduction Today the news about the annual high GDP growth of the Chinese economy does not surprise anyone. At the same time, many Western companies have decided to invest their money in that Country, opening new factories or importing goods. This trend has aroused my interest in China, expected to be one of the most powerful economies in the next few years (Visetti, 2012). In particular, China has been facing a slow but in-depth transformation of its institutions since 1978, when the Party leader Deng Xiaoping decided to open the Chinese market to foreign investments (Genzberger, 1994). Other important steps on the way to create a democratic environment in the Country were the economic reform that transformed the Chinese economy in the so-called “socialist-market economy” in 1992, the entrance in the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the Constitutional revision in 2004. With the Xiaoping “Open door” policy in 1978, China started the process of managing its means of production according to free market principles (Genzberger, 1994). This process was enriched by the admission of China in the World Trade Organization in 2001 that pushed the “Middle Kingdom” to lower the high trade barriers (The Economist, 2011) and in 2004, by the new Constitution that recognized for the first time private businesses and allowed them to enter public companies’ capital, within specific limits (Schulz, 2007; CIA World Factbook, 2012; Zhang S., 2014). However, many problems are still unsolved in the Chinese Country: the most problematic situations are represented by the low press freedom (Fishman, 2005; Visetti, 2012), the persecution of political oppositions (Visetti, 2012) and the judicial system that is still heavily influenced by politics and does not provide an independent service (Schulz, 2007). In this context, today, the Communist Party has started a public propaganda in order to promote the traditional values of the Chinese culture, after the Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution ban in the 1970s (Visetti, 2012). The government believes that Confucian values are useful to educate the next-generation leaders to temperance, loyalty and respect for elders (Visetti, 2012).