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… a convoy of ten Mercedes-Benz led by a Lincoln limousine preceded up the Chang’an Avenue in Beijing and stopped before a grand hotel. Flowers, balloons and small figurines decorated the motorcade. The newly wed couple stepped out of the limousine and were quickly surrounded by photographers, video cameras and a cheering crowd. This is the scene of a genuine modern day wedding in China (Guo, 2002, China.org.cn).

The above scenario depicted in a journalistic survey magnifies a compelling phenomenon in China’s socio-cultural landscape since the millennium: elaborate weddings being in vogue and the seemingly private issues of love and marriage becoming the showcase of class status. The so-called “modern day wedding,” a local spectacle created by the country’s nouveau riche, embodies not only the uprising of China’s wedding industry, but also the country’s increasing economic power especially after its political accession to WTO. Against the escalating torrents of globalization, the impact of Western wedding rituals on the local matrimonial tradition has caught scholars’ critical attention (Adrian, 2003, 2006; Gillette, 2000; Goldstein-Gidoni, 1997; Otnes & Pleck, 2003). As early as the 1990s, Adrian’s (2003) ethnographic study of the Taiwanese bridal industry points to the local culture’s starting trend of emulating Western feminine images disseminated via mass media. Adrian (2006) also notes that in the mid-1990s Taiwanese investors were opening beauty salons in mainland China and that gowns considered outdated and tattered in Taiwan were shipped to the mainland and reused among the “less discriminating” mainlanders (p. 78). Interestingly, the postmillennial consumer culture has witnessed the upper-middle class mainlanders ascending the rungs of the international fashion hierarchy. According to a most recent BBC news report, China’s wedding industry in its totality is worth over 80 billion USD, with the cost of weddings showing no sign of decrease as a result of the growing middle-class (Pressly, 2011). Like the Taiwanese bride, the mainland bride hitherto partakes in the role of an avid consumer of what Otnes and Pleck (2003) call “lavish weddings,” which used to mark the privilege of the Euro-American bride.

Indeed, the modern Chinese bride¹, turning into a divisive class symbol, seems empowered within the opulent Wedding consumption. Adorned with a brand-name tight-bodiced gown, lacey veil, stiletto, tiara, and cosmetics, the modern bride presents a sharp contrast to her counterparts of previous generations. In Chinese historicity, Chinese women were victims of patriarchal families, and arranged marriage and polygamy systems. As Zhang Yimou’s (1991) well-acclaimed blockbuster Raise the Red Lantern depicts, the feudal wife herself tokened blatant gender oppression in the not so distant memories of the pre-communist arranged marriage and polygamy systems. Zhang’s (1991) masterpiece vividly magnifies the atrocious victimization of the concubines who competed for their master’s gaze, symbolized by the bizarre ritual of lighting the red lanterns at the door of the favored wife. Historians also note that in the social realities of China’s feudal past, the bride remained voiceless, as if blindly following the fate of her arranged matrimony (Croll, 1980; Watson & Ebrey, 1991). The exchanges of properties between the families in the form of betrothal gifts from the groom’s family, and of dowry from the bride’s family implied that the bride was part of the property being transferred in the wedding ceremony (Watson & Ebrey, 1991). The traditional wedding costume consisted of a veil made of opaque fabrics. The veil, intended to make the bride appear shy and feminine, disguised and blinded her from the moment she departed from her parents’ household until the moment of the wedding ceremony’s completion when she was passively carried by the groom to their new bedroom. The bride of the feudal past was the unseeing player of the wedding, who had no control over her own rite of passage of transforming from a single woman into an immobilized bride and finally into a wife, encumbered with familial responsibilities and filial piety.

With the practice of betrothal gifts and dowry exchanges decreasing in the postsocialist era, the contemporary bride seemingly dominates her wedding ceremony, indulged in her self-centered consumption of the wedding industry, usually in the form of a globalizing “one-stop center,” which provides packaged wedding services ranging from making up and dressing up the bride, photographing, and arranging bouquets to catering just about everything else relevant to the celebration (D. Chen, 2003).

Such a luxurious wedding practice presents a stark contrast to that of the Mao era, during which the rituals of frugality ceremonies in the city hall prevailed. Couples were commonly declared married by a Communist Party member, say, a leader from the husband’s or the wife’s workplace. A spartan reception followed the unassuming ceremony where tea and homemade food was served. As anthropologist Constable (2006) recalls, the Cultural Revolution portraits of brides, for instance, showed “women in the same poses, clothing, and with the same expressions as men, but sometimes as smaller in size” whereas the modern bridal images underscored women’s gender identity especially via conspicuous consumption of feminine products (p. 50). The dramatically changed outlook of the modern bride against China’s vast historical backdrop triggers this particular study. This author argues that the material abundance accessible to the bride in the discourse of consumerism does not translate into the demise of patriarchal and hegemonic control over the bride. Scholarly discussions have shed light on the ways contemporary bridal industry, asserting its strong institutional power, commercializes weddings and disseminates hegemonic messages about gender roles, and heterosexual love, and marriage. The romanticized images of the Western bride, dressed up, made up, and coiffed for the supposedly most important day of her life, have received much criticism, as such images symbolize gender oppression on the beautified female body in the name of her rite of passage (Adrian, 2003; Engstorm, 2003, 2008; Engstorm & Semic, 2003; Levine, 2005; Otnes & Pleck, 2003). Borrowing from the existing studies, this paper examines the images of the bride constructed within China’s burgeoning wedding industry that sells lavish wedding products and services. More specifically, the author focuses on analyzing both the print issues and Web pages of the bridal magazines widely circulated in China’s consumer culture.

Whereas much research focuses on the bridal industry in the West and the ways it becomes a purveyor of hegemonic control, this study is centered on an analysis on the spread of consumerist ideologies in mainland China against the sweeping tide of globalization. This author is particularly concerned about the process of the global joining the local in producing new, oppressive gendered meanings that are leaving indelible marks on local women and their identity formation (see Evans, 2006). The popular texts of China’s bridal media constitute a microcosmic yet revealing case to elucidate how the blending of global and local forces reinscribes the local woman’s subordinate position in marriage and love. While current studies find the local emulating Western wedding rituals as a result of imbalanced transnational flows of cultural capital (Adrian, 2003, 2006; Otnes & Pleck, 2003), these studies have not yet identified the local industry’s nuanced adaptations of the tropes of Western weddings and the extent to which such adaptations construct the imagery of the Chinese bride. The burgeoning Chinese wedding industry points to a rich site wherein the hegemonic global forces join the local systems in fomenting new gendered meanings and gender politics. In other words, the lavish wedding, along with the imported Western rituals, conveys much more than “sophistication, luxury, and status” in Chinese culture (Otnes & Pleck, 2003, p. 199). Rather, the extravaganza of the wedding itself deflects the evolving regulatory mechanism of gender toward the consumerist agency of the Chinese bride.

The following analysis shows that China’s evolving wedding industry adapts the trite, oppressive trope of “romantic” Western wedding rituals into a bricolage of global fashions, lifestyles, beauty regimens, and marriage tips for the Chinese bride. Conveniently tapping into the rhetoric of consumerist agency and postfeminism, the wedding industry re-packages patriarchal domination over the bride in the process of generating profits and disseminating the ideal of consumer one-upmanship. It is further argued that the modern Chinese bride, seemingly empowered within her hedonistic wedding consumption, neither escapes from the gender scripts of Chinese society nor celebrates a significant enhancement of her status in her marital relationship. In particular, the bridal media normalizes heterosexual matrimony and reinscribes women’s subordinate position in marriage and love.

The dramatic changes of China’s wedding rituals jibe with the rapid growth of the wedding industry, an in-depth understanding of which needs to be contextualized within a welter of consumerist and gender discourses. In the early 1980s, the post-Mao open-door policy marked not only the inception of the watershed economic reform, but also the spread of Euro-American-led neoliberalism (E. Chen, 2012). Notably, the meanings of “neoliberalism” in the Chinese contexts have departed from Alexander Rüstow’s original conceptualization of the term, which is defined as “the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition and a strong and impartial state” (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009, pp. 13-14). As shown in the governmental report titled “China’s Progress toward the Millennium Development Goal” (Anonymous, 2008), China’s economy reform, in its developmental phases, manifests the central government’s strong regulating role toward the common goal of achieving “Xiao Kang” (translated as “moderately prosperous society”). In the process of opening up to the outside world, the Chinese state exerts constant control over the time and space for the inflow and outflow of transnational capitals and resources. However, the neoliberal values of state deregulation, marketization, and privatization have become pervasive in sections of the marketplace, which pose the least threat to the state dominance, the wedding industry being a case in point. Initiated from Deng Xiaoping’s notorious slogan “Getting Rich is Glorious,” the market economy eventually led to what Davis (2000) terms as a “consumer revolution,” during which the central state, state-owned enterprises, privatized industries, and joint ventures partake in the important role of fusing the local and global forces.

The rhetoric of consumer choice and agency, as a significant part of capitalist values, pervades Chinese everyday life. Such rhetoric, as Yang (2011) and Chen (2012) concur, resonates with Foucault’s (2008) discussions of “biopolitics,” a form of self-initiative governance that commands active choice and self-responsibility of the individualized consumer. Both scholars observe that the advocacy of consumerist agency has seeped into China’s gender politics and left deep imprints on the corporeality of the female body and femininity as well as on the modern woman’s consumer lifestyle (E. Chen, 2012; Yang, 2011). Yang (2011) is quick to note that the modern Chinese woman is constantly tempted to consume beautification products and services such as cosmetics and cosmetic surgery apropos of appearing younger and thus presumably more sexually attractive. Indeed, the self-disciplined woman consumer showcases her enhanced purchasing power and contributes tremendously to the prosperity of a beauty economy, a term that broadly refers to the utilization of feminine beauty for such profit-driven socio-economic activities as selling fashion, cosmetics, and beautification procedures, to name a few (X. Zhou, 2004; Xu & Feiner, 2007; Yang, 2011). However, the same economically empowered woman lacks the critical consciousness to detect the convoluted mechanism of gender oppression so quietly aligned with the neoliberal values.

In the representational terrain, Chen (2012) finds that the market logic exerts its influence on both local and global media’s construction of heroines who appear to “have it all”: beauty, sexual attractiveness, and financial independence. Chen’s (2012) analysis of Shanghai Baby, a novel representative of China’s popular yet controversial chic lit, points to the ostensible resemblance between the fashion-conscious, pleasure-seeking, and sexually confident Shanghai women and their American counterparts in Sex and The City, a contentious six-year run HBO drama series that has gone global since its debut in 1998. Like Carrie’s social circle, Chinese Coco and her female friends seem to enjoy financial security and consumer freedom over upscale commodities, world fashion, and even men. However, these female protagonists in both the American and Chinese versions fail to transcend the constraints of patriarchy entrenched in their cultures. After all, their display of self-control is contained within the consumption arena. Despite their career success, cosmopolitan sophistication, and cultural competence, these modern women longingly subject themselves to the male power and the institution of heterosexual love and marriage. Chic lit is not the sole media genre that mirrors the façade of female empowerment in China’s consumerist discourse. The year 2010 witnessed the popularity of reality dating shows on Chinese television. The show with the highest profile Fei Cheng Wu Rao (If You Are the One) aired on Jiangsu Satellite Television Channel recruits, for each episode, 24 women (aged between early 20s and mid 30s) as participants to search for a date, boyfriend, or even husband among five bachelors who become the final players only after undergoing scrutinizing interviews with the show’s production committee. The show has captivated millions of TV viewers at home and abroad, as they are intrigued by the social drama playing live on the stage, where the young women wield their “power” of questioning, challenging, and switching on and off their stage lights to determine the success or failure of each individual male player. The women on the stage, hailing from various parts of the country, share the conspicuous commonalities of youth, beauty, career success (mostly yuppies), and upper-middle class status. These women’s momentary power over each man finally gives way to the decisive domination of the male “survivor” who gets to pick his favorite date among the team of beautiful nouveaux riches so eager to marry themselves off.

The images of the women consumers with romance-saturated and materialistic lifestyle, both fictional and real, speak to the pervasive power of globalizing consumerist ideologies that create a façade of female empowerment in the local contexts. This author posits that the illusory freedom that modern Chinese women enjoy manifests the postfemininist mentality that is interwoven with consumerist values. Conceptualized within Western feminist scholarship, the loaded label of “postfeminism” implies a strategic divorce from the second-wave feminist movement, based upon the postulation that the political goal of women’s advancement has been achieved as their material needs are met (Vavrus, 1998). Sex and the City’s heroines Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha iconize postfeminist women in the West. In the Chinese contexts, the postfeminist mentality aligns well with the rhetoric of the post-Mao importation of capitalist market economy. The postfeminist icons in the chic lit Shanghai Baby and the reality TV show Fei Cheng Wu Rao seem to attest to the achievement of Mao’s feminist ambition for women “holding half of the sky” (Barret, 1973, p. 193). Then, the postfeminist sentiment misleadingly suggests that the current generation of women, the grownups of the one-child families, can veer away from the long-past political agendas of their mothers and grandmothers. In this regard, the postfemininst mentality conveniently justifies modern women’s indulgence in China’s burgeoning consumer culture but also legitimizes gendered consumption of woman-centered products and services-- wedding packages as a case in point. As feminist scholars have eloquently argued, postfeminism, as a supposedly liberating label, is tainted with the ideological turpitude of concealing gender inequality (Arthurs, 2003; Goldman, Heath, & Smith, 1991; Hains, 2009; Stillion-Southard, 2008; Luo, 2012a; Vavrus, 2000). Indeed, the seemingly empowered postfeminist female subject indexes a trivialization of women’s political lives and a truncated development of their collective critical consciousness on the one hand. On the other hand, the same female subject, with her consumerist agency, symbolizes a divisive social force, as she is supposed to represent the privileged, the educated, the upper-middle class, and the “haves” in the consumer culture (Luo, 2012a).

The postfeminist mentality, along with the rhetoric of consumerist agency, becomes the hotbed wherein oppressive gender politics spawn. Against the historical forces of the economy reform and the socio-cultural backdrop of globalizing consumerism, China’s wedding industry has bourgeoned into a multibillion USD conglomerate, pandering to the newly acquired expectations of women of the “1980s generation,” (the so-called “ba ling hou”) who, having grown up in the era of reform and globalization, are about to tie the knot. Research on Western weddings indicates that wedding enterprises expand via a synergistic blending with a plethora of industries, especially media conglomerates (Engstrom, 2008; Levine, 2005). Unsurprisingly, the Chinese wedding industry models itself after the globalizing trend. When Adrian (2003) first visited Taiwan to study the local bridal culture in the mid-1990s, she observed that beauty salons and photographic studios undertook the main tasks of styling the Taiwanese brides. Interestingly, Adrian (2003) also found that Taiwanese entrepreneurs were starting to explore the marketplace of mainland China, although the early reform era saw women mainlanders standing on the low rung of the world fashion hierarchy, yet to develop their aesthetic sensibilities. Along with the accelerating influx of global capitals, the new millennium has witnessed the small-scale aesthetic salons in mainland cities giving way to sprawling wedding corporations, which are establishing symbiotic relationships with photographing, jewelry, fashion, media, advertising, and tourist industries at home and abroad. A liaison between the local and global, annual wedding expos at regional, national, and international levels constitute an essential part of profit-generating mechanism upon which this particular industry is based. As a 2009 China Daily report perceives, even the global financial crisis failed to deter millions of Chinese newlyweds from splurging on packaged wedding services and products at the year’s Beijing Wedding Expo (X. R. Chen, 2009). An average couple is reported as spending 18,500 USD on a wedding, which is estimated to be 20 times their average monthly salary (X. R. Chen, 2009). The same journalistic report points to the flourishing of joint-venture enterprises. Local photography studios join hands with those in Europe and North America. The Professional Photographers of America (PPA), for instance, has opened its office to train local wedding photographers. The honeymoon, another big fat expenditure, has acquired certain local traits in the sense that professional photographers accompany the couple along their trip to shoot bridal portraits at the memorable spots of exotic locales (X. R. Chen, 2009). Given that the 2009 Wedding Expo gives a glimpse of the industry at the time of global economic downturn, the 2012 Expo in Beijing reports that 10 million couples tie the knot annually, thus generating a total of 63 billion USD from across the country (Women of China, 2012). Such statistics herald China’s vastly increased marketplace, expanding as if it knew no bounds, as well as the country’s wedding synergism that is ascending to the pinnacle of its kinds across the globe.

In sum, the intertwining neoliberal values of consumerist agency and the mentality of postfemism promote the rapid growth of the wedding industry in mainland China, which naturalizes its establishment as a bride-centered conglomerate, not only openly sharing the country’s consumer cornucopia, but also implicitly regimenting women’s bodies and their positions in marriage and love.

Since it is not feasible to examine the industry in its totality, this research focuses on analyzing the bridal magazines widely circulated in China’s consumer culture. More specifically, selected print issues (published from January, 2011 until June, 2012) and Web pages² of Zexy (Da Zhong Jie Xi), Modern Brides (Xin Niang), Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang), and Goinlove.com (Shi Shang Hun Qing Wang) are used as the corpus of the textual examination. As these magazines (except for Goinlove.com, which is a wedding consultation Web site) are all monthly periodicals with an average of 200 pages in each print issue, this author read through more than 10,000 pages of magazine texts.

The analysis of the bridal magazine texts was approached through the methodological framework of semiotics. The value of semiotics for this study is its ability to place a text within a larger system of cultural representations. From this perspective, it is not the text itself as much as it is the decoded meaning of that text that is important to understand. Barthes (1972) believes that meanings can be analyzed, based upon two orders of signification. The first level refers to denotation, a surface understanding that describes the “direct, specific meaning we get from a sign” (Berger, 1989, p. 48). This level constitutes the simple, basic, descriptive level of a sign, where “consensus is wide and most people would agree on the meaning” (Hall, 1997, p. 38). The second level consists of connotation, usually in the form of myths and symbols, which go beyond the surface understanding of the denotative level. Connotation involves an interpretation of contexts, such as the surrounding culture and symbolism. The signifiers that have been decoded at the denotative level through the use of “conventional classifications” enter wider and more sophisticated codes, which “link them with what we may call the wider semantic fields of our culture” (Hall, 1997, p. 38). Meanings at this level are no longer at a descriptive level of common and obvious interpretations. Instead, interpretations are connected to wider realms of social ideologies. Ultimately, connotative meanings of signs turn into, reflect, and/or reinforce, ideological myths (Berger, 1989). Barthes³ (1972) explains:

The text is indeed the creator’s (and hence society’s) right of inspection over the image; anchorage is control, bearing a responsibility –in the face of the projective power of pictures–for the use of the message. With respect to the liberty of the signifieds of the image, the text has thus a repressive value and we can see that it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested. (p. 40)

The author finds Barthes’ s semiotic framework a useful guide to the analysis of the verbal and visual texts of the bridal magazines in that this framework allows for reading between the lines, identifying both denotative and connotative meanings of texts, and thus delving into the ideologies the texts convey, construct and/or reinforce. In this analysis, the discursive and fragmentary of portrayals of the Chinese bride and her wedding consumption constitute a microcosm of conflating consumerist and gender discourses. Special attention is paid to not only the ideological underpinnings the media texts convey, but also the power relationships that these texts negotiate and buttress. The analysis serves two purposes: 1) to understand how the globalizing practices of lavish weddings are being repackaged and sold to the local women consumers; and 2) to interrogate how the globalizing forces join hands with the local industry to recreate new forms of oppressive gender politics under the banner of consumer one-upmanship.

Apparently, a significant player within the wedding synergism is the media. Bridal magazines develop both print and online versions, creating a dazzling array of wedding artifacts, images, and representations for the modern Chinese bride, who is glorified in all her finery within the full bloom of the industry. Zexy (Da Zhong Jie Xi), Modern Brides (Xin Niang), Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang), and Goinlove.com (Shi Shang Hun Qing Wang), stand out as the mainstay of the Chinese bridal publications, reaching multitudinous readers who can subscribe the print issues or surf the Web pages. Interestingly, the unit prices of the magazines’ print editions are very low, ranging from merely 1.6 USD to 4 USD per issue. Furthermore, with a total monthly circulation of over one million print copies, these publications seem affordable to even low income readers. However, sample readings of these magazines’ mission statements indicate that their major target readers are the educated upper-middle class, especially those who have ascended China’s new social hierarchy. For example, sm114.com.cn, one of the popular search engines of media, publicizes the current reader profile of Modern Brides (Xin Niang), which says that 92% of its readers are college graduates and that 69% of the reader population earn a monthly income of above 565 USD (3500 RMB).

These different magazines, all with their inceptions in the new millennium, share the commonality of establishing a complex web of symbiotic relationships with both local and global enterprises. Whereas Zexy (Da Zhong Jie Xi) cooperates with the Japanese Zexy publications, mutually sharing resources, Modern Brides (Xin Niang) indicates in every monthly issue that the Chinese magazine has established copyright alliance with America’s Advanced Magazine Publishers, Inc, whose registered trademarks include Moden Brides, Brides, and Elegant Bride. By contrast, both Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang), and Goinlove.com (Shi Shang Hun Qing Wan) focus on domestic networking, yet drawing heavily from resources about foreign wedding rituals, world fashion designs, and international brand-name commodities and services. The characteristics of media synergism are most distinctly manifested in Goinlove.com, a comprehensive wedding Web site that provides hyperlinks to wedding events, products, and services in a total of 47 major cities across mainland China. Albeit having different ownerships and joint ventures, these bridal magazines, in tandem with their Web pages, configure a kaleidoscopic collection on weddings, marriages, brides, and fashion. The chromatic magazine/Web pages, replete with photographs of shining jewelry, blooming floras, flashy fashion designs, and picturesque tourist spots, serve the function of “guiding” the modern bride through the rite of her wedding, from selecting the gown, purchasing the package consisting of professional photographers, planners, emcees, and coordinators, to deciding the honeymoon locale. However, a close semiotic reading reveals that these magazines go beyond what they claim, in their mission statements, to be consumer guides, and become identifiable power holders adapting global forces to the Chinese context and fomenting oppressive yet discursive gender discourses. More specifically, they assert their hegemonic role of normalizing the lavish wedding, constructing the “ideal” bride, and regimenting gender roles in marriage and love. Ironically, upper-middle class professional women join their male counterparts to serve on the editorial committees of these magazines. For instance, both Modern Brides (Xin Niang) and Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang) have hired women editorial directors⁴. Most noticeably, a team of fashion, copyright, and art women editors works for Modern Brides (Xin Niang). These women problematically take an active part in molding and perpetuating the oppressive gender regime of the media.

In the analysis, this author begins from the notion of “packaging” and further looks into the ways the magazine texts－a microcosm of China’s wedding industry－repackage the trite, oppressive trope of “romantic” Western weddings into a bricolage of global fashions, lifestyles, beauty regimens, and marriage tips for the Chinese bride. The author borrows from anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1974) the concept of “bricolage,” which refers to the act of (re)creating improvised structures/objects via an appropriation of pre-existing materials ready to hand. In Lévi- Strauss’s (1974) initial conception, a bricoleur, one who engages in bricolage, is “someone who works with his [her] hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman” (pp. 16-17). In other words, the performance of bricolage conveys the bricoleur’s subjectivity and agency in the process of creating his/her own signification of meanings. In the Chinese case, this author posits that the local wedding industry undertakes the task of a bricoleur. However, its bricolage, pandering to women’s consumerist agency, masks new forms of oppressive gender and social scripts.

The bridal publications constitute a fascinating cultural terrain, in which the diversification of Chinese women’s cultural experience goes hand in hand with the rigid re-inscription of their gender roles. As this analysis shows, the magazine texts present a microcosmic picture of China’s wedding media conglomerations, which exert hegemonic control over women consumers via tapping into such globalizing forces as neoliberal values of agency and postfeminist mentality. Importantly, this article unravels the intricate ways the media texts construct the imagery of the modern Chinese bride, who appears as if she enjoys the best offered by the confluence of local and global consumerist prosperities. The extravagant wedding rituals, the exorbitant bricolage of romance, and the pricey beautification commodities and technologies are repackaged for the achievement of the ideal of consumer one-upmanship. But the lavish wedding packages represent the synecdoche of an ongoing process, in which the globalizing forces join hands with the local systems in regimenting local women’s bodies, and recreating patriarchal social and gender scripts that are detrimental to women’s efforts to achieve equality in marriage and love.

Through analyzing the media images of the modern Chinese bride, this study opens up further research on the social realities of matrimony and love in China’s globalizing consumer culture. Within the scope of textual analysis, this article has not yet explored beyond the representational terrain. Being an insider of Chinese culture, the author is well aware of what has been left out of bridal publications’ depictions of the glamorous bride. As Chen (2003) implies in his journalistic report titled “A Match Made in Heaven, If You Have Enough Yuan,” China’s development of market economy witnesses the ever-increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots. One social phenomenon that signifies such a gap is that migrant laborers from the rural areas attempt to seek economic advancement in cosmopolitan cities only to find low income positions. Among the influx of rural labor forces are the lower-class, rural young women who search for love and marriage in cities in hope of “marrying up,” so to speak, but end up being taken advantage of or even abused by comfortably well-off urban men, according to a news report in Women of China (2007), the official publication by All China Women’s Federation. The scene of women migrants struggling outside the door to marriage strikes a discord into lavish wedding showcases in China’s mediascape. Another social phenomenon that also raises concerns about Chinese women’s status in their matrimony is referred as “Bao Ernai” (China Daily, 2000), which literally means “raising mistresses” on the part of unfaithful husbands who become wealthy and desire extramarital affairs to signify the emergence of what Zheng (2012) calls “entrepreneurial masculinity” in China’s postsocialist marketplace (p. 45). Furthermore, women’s disempowerment in their love and marriage lives surfaces in the widespread reality TV dating shows such as Fei Cheng Wu Rao (If You Are the One), and Wo Men Yue Hui Ba (Lets Date). These shows depict the upper-middle class, postfeminist women eagerly jumping onto the marry-yourself-off bandwagon while those being left-behind are called “shengnü” (“leftover women”), a label imbued with gender inequality. In sum, the juxtaposition of the modern Chinese bride, in her packaged glamour, and her less-fortunate counterparts falling out of the grand wedding performance, calls for further interrogation of the intertwining social and gender oppression concealed beneath the veneer of consumerist prosperities.

Whereas this paper magnifies the role of the local industry as the dexterous bricoleur, especially in its textual construction of the modern bride, it has not yet examined women consumers’ subjectivities in being or becoming bricoleurs who create their own signified meanings through the consumption of wedding products, services, and media. As globalization scholars point out, while local consumers desire global products and emulate global consumption behaviors, they neither abandon their own culture, tradition, or heritage, nor do they become passive receivers of global ideas (Chua & Iwabuchi, 2008; Featherstone & Lash, 1995; Roberston, 1995). Rather, such consumers exert “the power to adapt, innovate, and maneuver within a glocalized world” (Ritzer, 2004, p. 77). In this regard, this analysis points to future discussions on the reception end of the wedding industry through looking into Chinese brides’ unique, personal perspectives.