129.Interesting Chinese Culture——How did advertising in China slowly take shape?

These days, we are so surrounded by ads that we are almost numb to them. You unlock your phone and the first thing you see is a notification. You open a webpage and a pop-up jumps right into the middle of the screen. You scroll through short videos and suddenly one cuts in with, “Friends, you have to buy this.” Even when you just want to sit quietly and listen to some music, before the intro is even over, you can get hit with ads for shampoo, insurance, and during election season, even ninety-second campaign ads. Basically, whatever ads a website wants to throw at you, it just keeps cycling them in front of you. So it is very easy to feel that all of this belongs to the modern commercial world, as if advertising could only exist after factories, assembly lines, neon city lights, television, and the internet came along.