In a couple of weeks millions of Chinese will go back to their home village to see their parents and grandparents. It’s a huge migration and the train stations and bus stations are even more packed than usual with people struggling under the weight of bags stuffed full of gifts and supplies. Often this is the only time they will go home during the year.
It is surely no coincidence that these posters have started appearing in the metro system in Shanghai in the run up to the period when families are traditionally reunited.
The Chinese translates roughly as ‘abandoning the elderly is like putting them in a cage’. Maybe it will shame some of those young city dwellers to make the often long arduous journey to the village to check up on the old folk rather than holiday in exotic foreign places.
What struck me as unusual however, was the fact that the posters show white western men rather than Chinese. Why is this? Surely China has more than its fair share of frail elderly people they could have stuck in a cage for a photo shoot – why pick one of ours? It’s hardly representative of the people they are aiming the advert at.
Or maybe I have missed the point. Maybe the government is targeting foreign guests and trying to persuade us to go back to Europe, USA etc. to visit our parents. Why else would they have put the message in English and used a Caucasian model? If the message is for the Chinese population why have they used English? It’s all very perplexing.
