What Happened to China’s Traditional Clothing?

When I first came to China, I often wondered why more people didn’t wear traditional Chinese clothing. Living in Japan I commonly saw kimono, whether a married woman’s elegant tomesode or a simple summery yukata. While in South Korea, I passed women strolling through Seoul in resplendent hanbok almost daily (though traditionally-dressed men were far less common). During my time in India, I met women in sari and men in lungi as frequently as I met those without. I love the regional costumes of Asia – Vietnamese ao dai, Thai pha nung, Tibetan chuba, Mongolian deel – but am rarely treated to the pleasure in China. And as with so many things here, the reason for this seems to do with politics.

The Honorable Daphne Guinness, fashion icon and fifth great-granddaughter of the Irish brewer Arthur Guinness, once said, “Fashion is not just about trends. It’s about political history.” And so indeed it is with China. Hanfu, literally “Han clothing,” is the kimono’s antecedent and was the livery of elites for over three millennia, as well as an unmistakable display of their political power.

When the Manchus seized Beijing in 1644, initiating the Qing dynasty, they demanded that local Han subjects adopt Manchu styles. The 1645 tifaling or Queue Order required that Han men wear their hair in bianzi (“braids” or queues), which required a shaved forehead and a long braid down the back. But according to Confucianism, damaging the body (a gift from one’s parents) violated filial piety and many Han Chinese therefore refused the order – to which Qing officials famously replied, “keep your hair and not your head or keep your head and not your hair.” Growing out one’s hair thus became an act of political defiance, as when the Taiping rebels refused to wear bianzi and were nicknamed changmao or “long-haired ones.”

Another imposition was the Manchu manner of dress. Being a semi-nomadic people, Manchu wore clothing befitting a more active lifestyle: form-fitting changpao consisting of changshan for men and qipao for women. Though commoners weren’t required to comply, changpao soon became popular with the general public too, to the extent that Chinese more or less adopted it as their national dress. In fact, when the Qing dynasty ended in 1912 and Sun Yat-sen took office as the first president of the Republic of China, he wore a modified changshan known today as a Zhongshan zhuang or “Yat-sen suit” (also “Mao suit”).

The qipao, or Mandarin gown, has also remained popular among Chinese women. Meanwhile, the Kuomintang (KMT) wore Zhongshan suits before adopting their later Nazi-chic uniforms (complete with Stahlhelme), after which the Communist Party took up the Zhongshan suit as a symbol of national unity (Party members continued to wear it right up into the 1990s). Its popularity has, however, recently waned. Deng Xiaoping wore it religiously; Jiang Zemin more often donned Western suits; Hu Jintao wore it only for special occasions; and Xi Jinping has all but forsaken it, though last year he did wear one to a state banquet in Amsterdam.

This is not to say that Xi is unaware of the political impact of his sartorial decisions. He may have left the Zhongshan suit behind, but he has embraced a new symbol of power – the windbreaker. Other Party officials have followed suit, so to speak, with China Times and Ta Kung Pao dubbing the trend jiake qingjie or “jacket complex.” It’s come to represent the ethos of a down-to-earth leader rather than the authority of a military official. As Julian B. Gewirtz reported in May, Xi has adopted the windbreaker as a symbol of transformation “from a corrupt and formalistic bureaucracy into a more popular and flexible institution.”

But the politicization of clothing in China isn’t restricted to political figures. In January 2014, Evan Osnos reported on the renewed popularity of Confucianism and Tea Leaf Nation’s Rachel Lu reported on the influence of Neo-Confucianism on academia. This trend has lit upon clothing too; last December when students boycotted Christmas as a pernicious foreign influence they were, of course, dressed in hanfu. There are also others who believe hanfu should be worn all the time, or required on special occasions, such as graduation ceremonies. And hanfu was proposed (though later rejected) as the official clothing of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

Like the afro, hanfu has become a political symbol of ethnic identity. There’s even a “hanfu movement.” Yet hanfu represents a single ethnic group out of 56, so it’s unlikely the national will, as Gaungzhou Daily’s Gong Dao advises, to adopt hanfu as China’s “national costume.” China doesn’t have a national costume – it has national costumes.

Furthermore, the hanfu movement is a bit of a painted heel, a convoluted attempt to revive old notions of nationalism. But Chinese have an incredibly complex relationship with history, and are understandably eager to move forward. Besides, there are more modern ways to make political fashion statements. The 2014 China Fashion Week, for instance, featured a “pollution chic” display with runway models in heavy-duty smog masks.

This is, perhaps, why one doesn’t see more Chinese in traditional garb, whether it be hanfu, Zhongshan suits, or Tang dynasty banbi. These options are suffused with political meaning and most Chinese aren’t thinking about making political statements when getting dressed in the morning.