{"id":5610,"date":"2017-03-24T07:27:19","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T21:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/?p=5610"},"modified":"2022-09-04T17:42:14","modified_gmt":"2022-09-04T07:42:14","slug":"chinas-state-of-warring-styles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/journal\/chinas-state-of-warring-styles\/","title":{"rendered":"China’s State of Warring Styles"},"content":{"rendered":"

In modern China (as in so many other countries), changing fashions<\/a>\u00a0have reflected the shifting\u00a0political and cultural\u00a0landscape of the country. The success of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution<\/a> not only saw the abdication of the last Chinese emperor, it also ushered in the Zhongshan Suit \u4e2d\u5c71\u88dd (known in the international media as the Mao Jacket)\u00a0designed for the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan), an item of clothing\u00a0replete with revolutionary symbolism. Although other\u00a0revolutions led to calls of ‘Off With Their Heads!’, in China the 1911 Revolution did bring about\u00a0the End of the Queue<\/a>\u00a0\u8fae\u5b50, a hairstyle imposed by the throne in the early years of the Qing dynasty nearly three hundred years earlier.<\/p>\n

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Prince Yong \u548c\u78a9\u96cd\u89aa\u738b, Aisin-Gioro Injen \u611b\u65b0\u89ba\u7f85\u00b7\u80e4\u799b, later the Yongzheng emperor, H\u016bwaliyasun Tob h\u016bwangdi<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Chinese robes, Manchu fashion, Western suits, revolutionary garb: the clash over styles, ideology and consumerism continues to this day. As early as the Yongzheng \u96cd\u6b63 reign of the Qing dynasty (1723-1735), the ruler felt he had to defend the animal festooned gowns of his officials\u00a0against charges that they represented barbarian bestiality. Qing court attire was derided by those loyal to the fallen house of the Ming as nothing more than ‘peacock feather caps and horse-hoof sleeved robes: the vestments of birds and beasts’ \u5b54\u96c0\u7fce\u99ac\u8e44\u8896\u8863\u51a0\u4e2d\u79bd\u7378. Yongzheng championed the virtue of Qing rule, and its wardrobe in\u00a0his Record of Awakening to Righteousness<\/em>\u00a0\u5927\u7fa9\u89ba\u8ff7\u9304<\/a>. Two hundred and fifty years later, Chinese\u00a0Communists and their foreign ideology\u00a0were\u00a0decried for being like a Disastrous Flood and Wild Beasts \u6d2a\u6c34\u731b\u7378. Today the Party and its Chairman of Everything, Xi Jinping, affirm that they rule by virtue \u5fb7\u653f; nonetheless, they still\u00a0walk a cultural\u00a0tightrope: defending their vision of China on one hand while espousing\u00a0a heavily edited version of a tradition they originally\u00a0rejected\u00a0on the other.<\/p>\n

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In March 2014, President Xi Jinping and China’s First Lady, Peng Liyuan \u5f6d\u9e97\u5a9b, embarked on a series of state visits, including to Belgium. Peng, who previously enjoyed a successful career as a singer, is known for her personal style and engaging manner. She was particularly prominent during the couple’s European tour for her wardrobe.<\/p>\n

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Peng Liyuan and Xi Jinping in neo-trad garb during their March\u00a02014 state visit to Belgium. Source: press.cn<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

‘First Lady Diplomacy’ and the dress of leaders’ wives have a chequered history in the People’s Republic. Wang Guangmei \u738b\u5149\u7f8e, wife of president Liu Shaoqi \u5289\u5c11\u5947, attracted considerable attention when she wore a white cheong-sam\/qipao<\/em> and a pearl necklace during a state visit to Indonesia in April 1963. A few years later, she was subjected to cruel parody by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution and suffered public humiliation by being dressed in a mock cheong-sam<\/em> and made to wear a necklace made out of ping-pong balls during a mass denunciation rally.<\/p>\n

Jiang Qing \u6c5f\u9752, Mao Zedong’s wife and paragon of the Cultural Revolution, was known for her austere style of dress. She even had a hand in designing a ‘national costume’ \u570b\u670d for women in 1974 to parallel the Mao Jacket.<\/p>\n

Peng Liyuan is the first leader’s spouse since Jiang Qing to make a fashion statement and, in the March 2014 trip to Belgium, she appeared in a heavily embroidered traditional- style ensemble. For his part, Xi Jinping wore a reimagined Zhongshan suit, the four pockets of the Mao jacket being replaced by two pockets and a concealed pocket on the chest with a Western-style pocket square. Such forays into Sino-fashion, however, are rare: generally Xi wears a business suit, unless he’s visiting the troops or making some major Party pronouncement in which case he dons revolutionary garb; and Peng Liyuan’s style is more in sync with that of Melania or Ivanka Trump than that of a Ming matriarch\u00a0(see my ‘Public Appearance’, in Under One Heaven<\/a>, the introduction to the 2014 China Story Yearbook: Shared Community<\/em>,\u00a0p.xv).<\/p>\n

The author of the following essay, Kevin Carrico, introduces us to the unsettling\u00a0world of the Han-Chinese Clothing Movement, one whose adherents\u00a0feel betrayed by reality. Zealots supporting Han purity have been prominent since the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom civil war of the mid-nineteenth century when the Christian rebels launched racial attacks on the Manchus. Later in the century racist radicals like Zhang Taiyan \u7ae0\u592a\u708e helped foster a popular hysteria that, in the first decade of the Republic of China, led to bloody anti-Manchu pogroms. Now, a century later, some Han purists even discuss a Final Solution for China’s borderland peoples (extermination, internment camps, exile).<\/p>\n

Inspired by the post-June Fourth state-nationalism orchestrated by the Communist Party (something I described at length in To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic<\/a>\u00a0in 1995), China Clothing advocates draw their ideas from a miscellany of sources. These include period dramas, Peking opera, kung-fu movies, Hong Kong and Taiwan culture, and so on. They meld paranoia and racism with romanticism; their views\u00a0are steeped in\u00a0the political quackery of the party-state, which long ago\u00a0created an\u00a0alternate-facts world for China. It is the world of\u00a0Han supremacists like\u00a0Zhai Quan’an \u7fdf\u5168\u5b89, interviewed<\/a>\u00a0in 2008 by the\u00a0oral historian Sang Ye \u6851\u66c4 as part of The Rings of Beijing<\/a><\/em> project.<\/p>\n

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Kevin Carrico<\/a>\u00a0is a lecturer in the Department of International Studies (Modern Languages and Cultures) at Macquarie University. He is the author of The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition<\/i><\/a>, University of California Press. The following essay was edited to accord with the style of\u00a0China Heritage<\/i>\u00a0and it is published here as a chapter in\u00a0New Sinology Jottings<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Geremie R. Barm\u00e9,
\nEditor, China Heritage<\/em>
\n24 March 2017<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

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