Environmental Public Service Advertising (PSA) “with Chinese Elements”: A Visual Semiotic Analysis of Localized WWF Print Campaigns in Mainland China

This article examines environmental public service announcements, or eco-PSAs, as increasingly crucial yet under-investigated tools for environmental communication in mainland China. Following an overview of existing gaps in the literature on both visual and localized forms of environmental communication, it evaluates the birth, development and new trends of Chinese eco-PSAs. It then explains the process of data collection and the methodology employed, which is visual semiotic analysis. The corpus consists of seven print eco-PSAs, sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), that employ “Chinese elements” as the main creative strategy. Findings show that these eco-PSAs use a range of culturally loaded elements (from folk art and idioms to inanimate objects, from Chinese characters to animal symbols) as intertextual references or visual metaphors to promote awareness of animal protection, ecological protection and resource saving, as well as reinforcing national culture. This contribution opens up new directions in researching visual environmental communication in a global context and presents new empirical findings demonstrating that, in Chinese eco-PSAs, local culture still matters.