Globally, China is in 12th place in advertising, spending 0.62% of GDP on advertising while in America it’s 1.36%. We spend $285 billion on ads while China spends $90 billion.

The PRC’s ad spending is rising while ours is overall declining. Digital media has been experiencing a slow-motion crash for a while. This will continue to devastate the media. 

As I’ve been writing for a while, the media is on track to die off as for-profit ventures and continue on as non-profits subsidized by the government, taxpayers and lefty billionaires. Some Republicans, including FOX News favorites who play at being very much on the right, have been happy to collude in carving out tax breaks, special exemptions and assorted benefits for the media which will come back to bite us in the ass.

But that’s a discussion for another time.

Advertising plays a key role in subsidizing internet content, the media and Big Tech companies which make much of their money from offering free services in exchange for participating in their big data harvesting schemes. China has shown that it can do it too, but it focuses on manufacturing. We build advertising empires whose purpose, innately, is selling Chinese products to Americans. While the Chinese focus on manufacturing them. Think of China’s companies as the cartels while our economy is dominated by street-level drug dealers whose business is getting the cartel’s products to Americans.

China focuses on making the drugs. American advertising sells them. Who’s in a better position, the cartels or the street-level drug dealers moving the product and preying on their own communities?

If you think of the rise of China as payback for the Opium Wars, you won’t be far off.