Why China's Shopping Malls Spent the Holiday Advertising Scientists

For one week, the most expensive advertising space in some of China's busiest commercial districts is running ads for things nobody can buy. In shopping malls and metro stations from Zhengzhou to Hangzhou, Hefei, Hebi and Hulunbuir, the giant screens that usually cycle through lipsticks, phones and idol-endorsed sneakers have spent the National Day holiday showing portraits of Qian Xuesen, the father of China's missile program; Deng Jiaxian, the nuclear physicist; Tu Youyou, who won the Nobel Prize for malaria medicine; and Yuan Longping, the rice breeder. The campaign has its own trending topics — "the golden ad C-position is left for meritorious scientists" — and a slogan travelling with it: "these are the stars most worth chasing."

The C-position, in Chinese pop-star choreography, is the centre spot; the point of the campaign is the transfer of that spot from celebrities to national heroes. It began modestly. In June, a shopping mall in Heze, Shandong, hung a poster of Qian Xuesen on its outside wall with his quotation — "Don't lose confidence; as long as you keep at it, there will be results" — and a caption calling scientists "the truly top-tier stars the Chinese nation should look up to for generations." Other malls picked it up; by the holiday, Xinhua's Qianbilou studio was recording the same posters in cities from Hangzhou and Hefei to Hulunbuir, and the state broadcaster listed the story among its items of the day. In Zhengzhou, the convention-centre metro station has given its hall-length screen band over to the scientists' portraits, and passengers stopped to photograph them on the holiday's first morning.

The enthusiasm is partly organised — the campaign is explicitly a public-service action, and Xinhua's endorsement carries weight — but it has caught on beyond the push: the slogan "these are the stars most worth chasing" began travelling on its own. Even the exam-preparation industry moved within days: one training account had already converted the campaign's slogans into a fill-in-the-blank question for its students, a small illustration of how quickly official language becomes testable material.

What resonates is the contrast the campaign itself draws. The same malls that license idol imagery for every surface spent the holiday paying tribute to people whose contribution was measured in decades — the nuclear program that Qian and Deng built under embargo, the decades of rice breeding behind Yuan's hybrid harvests. The framing flatters a specific Chinese instinct: that the country's real celebrities are its engineers and researchers, and that a holiday crowd photographing Deng Jiaxian where a handbag ad used to be is a healthier national mirror than the alternative.

The contrast has also travelled. Posts pitting the Zhengzhou metro displays against the K-pop posters on South Korean school walls have circulated in recent weeks, with Korean commenters conceding a point despite themselves: the display was, one said, "a bit doctrinaire — and, honestly, a little enviable." When the holiday ends, the slots go back to the brands. The Heze mall's Qian Xuesen poster, for what it is worth, has been up since June.