In mid July, Dior released their fall collection, summarized as “a fascinating exploration of past, present and future.” In it, a black skirt priced at $3,800 got some attention from some netizens in China. Someone criticized Dior for plagiarizing a tradition Chinese skirt called Mamianqun or Horse Face skirt. That poost on Chinese social media went viral and got official media support. Dior took down the skirt on its Chinese online store, but continued to sell it on its stores (online and offline) outside China.
With the help of Chinese state media, the outrage over Dior’s cultural appropriation grew bigger. About 50 Chinese students in Europe went to the Champs-Élysées to protest in front of the Dior store. A dozen democracy activists also went to counter-protest with a sign “A skirt is bigger than Human Rights”. According to DW, the Chinese students attacked the democracy activists.
Eventually, Dior took down the skirt from all its stores. You can read CNN: Dior accused of ‘culturally appropriating’ centuries-old Chinese skirt. The Dior product reference was 257J68A3332_X1700.
The CNN article introduced the Hanfu subculture with a video: Ancient Chinese fashion is making a comeback. Worth a watch if you are curious of the style of clothes that has a comeback among young Chinese: Hanfu is the trend among Chinese young people to wear ancient Chinese clothes as a fashion statement. It became increasingly popular since 2001. This year, photos of a graduation ceremony of a teacher training college spread on Chinese social media because the entire school were dressed in Hanfu:
The Hanfu subculture, according to its founder, was a political movement hijacked by commercial interests. The original political message is Han chauvinism. It is variant of Chinese nationalism. While the official nationalism acknowledge China’s multi-ethnicity nature, the Han chauvinism consider Han as the rightful dominant group in China. The equivalent in the West would be White nationalism.
Han chauvinism is particularly anti-West, because “current influence from the West has downgraded the development of China’s own cultural customs”. Chinese education system and the concept of graduation ceremony are all copies from the West. By wearing traditional Chinese clothes, instead of the usual western style clothes, the Hanfu movement wanted to make a statement. Unfortunately, many netizens quickly pointed out that even the names in modern education system in Chinese, such as primary school, middle school and college came from Kanji of Japaneses.
Hanfu as a political movement is just ridiculous. But it sells
This story is captured by James Palmer on Twitter. You can directly click, or read my quotes:
so the Pelosi trip has overshadowed it but it is worth noting just how nuts the current wave of anti-Japanese feeling in China is and the absolute nothingburger that started it.
so back in 2017 a young woman in Nanjing is having nightmares about the Nanjing Massacre. in a extremely misplaced act of spiritual compassion, she decides, it seems, that the souls of the Japanese who participated in the massacre need to be prayed for
so she pays for five memorial tablets at a Buddhist temple in Nanjing - four of which are Japanese war criminals who were involved in the massacre, and one of which is an American missionary who saved people.
now the temple monks who she pays for this obviously have no idea who these people are. Japanese names rendered in Chinese look Chinese, basically, and while these are known war criminals, they’re not, like, Hitler level famous. think SS officer.
she goes back to her work as a nurse and eventually leaves to become a Buddhist layperson; she also seems to have some mental health issues.
the tablets sit there for five years, nobody notices, until some keen-eyed tourist spots them and takes a picture highlighting who the names are.
instant online fury. 600 million views on Weibo! contentions that this is a Japanese Plot to desecrate the memory of the dead. a huge hunt begins in Nanjing, the monks are all punished, so are nine local officials
context for this of course is that the prayers for the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine in Japan (which is Shinto) are one of the big continual contention points and symbols of the Japanese right and atrocity denialism
this leads to a wave of anti-Japanese anger. a bunch of cultural events get cancelled. It also causes the religious affairs department - now part of the United Front Work Department since 2018 - to issue orders for all temples to conduct self-rectification, etc.
in the meantime the government successfully tracks down the woman who paid for the tablets, and charges her with the usual ‘picking quarrels and making trouble’ for ‘we want to arrest you but you didn’t actually commit a crime’.
the discovery that this was one misguided Chinese person does not seem to have done a lot to quench the anger, though there has been a certain amount of frustrated pushback over the anime conventions being cancelled, etc.
anyway what this means is that if you are a Buddhist, and you now want to go pay your local temple to pray for your granny’s soul, they now have to send the name to the local government and probably also do, as it were, due diligence themselves.
at this point the government seems to be trying to pour cold water on the whole thing when it comes to the anti-Japanese stuff, but they can’t quite bring themselves to let go of the idea that this must basically be Japan’s fault
but it’s also worth thinking about what the constant retelling of atrocity and vengeance stories does to people, especially in the degraded forms of popular entertainment.
Later, Mr. Palmer wrote another thread explaining the Buddhist tradition when ceremony performed to show compassion to “the souls of those who have done evil”. But of course putting the names of Japanese war criminals into the temple is out of the normal range.
On August 10th, a young Chinese anime fan wearing a kimono for photos in Suzhou (a city in Jiangsu province, very close to Shanghai) was shouted at and dragged by a police. She was then arrested and taken to the police station for 5 hours of interrogations, and her phone searched. She was also told not to talk about it on social media. But on August 14th, she posted on Weibo about her experience. She said she felt so angry and so humiliated, and she did not know that she never had freedom to wear things or freedom to express herself. She also claimed that she loved Hanfu as well as kimono, and she loved cultural diversity, and meanwhile she was also very patriotic. She is a very typical Chinese youth.
Her story went viral right away, with 90 million viewership until it was taken down. Videos of the event are also circulating, giving you some idea of her encounter with the police: first-person pov and wider angle.
Although the reaction from the police, who shouted at her because, as a Chinese, she should not wear kimono, is part of the anti-Japan fever, the reaction from netizens are overwhelmingly against the police.
For example, people pointed out the Chinese word for police also is kanji. In fact, most of modern vocabulary in Chinese directly came from kanji. Shocking, right? But it is well known to Chinese who know a bit of history.
Others pointed at the abuse of power of the police: “This is not about kimono, this is about them doing whatever they want to ordinary people outside laws. Today, they take you because of kimono, tomorrow, they take you for something else. There are so many reasons they don’t like you. If there is no stopping on such behaviour, there will be more abuse.”
Others reflect on the irrational behaviour of the police: “I feel that the police is in a very heightened state. The police department is very keen on brainwashing them, as far as I know. They are the ones that should have ability to think logically, as they are enforcing law and order, but they seem to lose it first.”
Many comments under the original post of the girl tell her to “run”, using a recently popular internet slang, 润, the Chinese character’s pinyin for “run”. It means to get out of China quickly.
On August 13th, Shanghai government promoted commercial activities with a “55 shopping festival”. Shops are asked to give discount to attract consumers. On August 14th, around 8pm, when people were shopping at IKEA, one customer was identified as a close contact for COVID, the shop went into lock down mode. Around 11pm, they were told that they will be moved to hotels for 48 hours quarantine.
On Chinese social media, people call it a successful entrapment of the people by the government.
Dongxing, is a town across a river from Vietnam. It has been in lock down since Chinese new year. Everyday, at 9 am, everyone has to get a PCR test. Still, the COVID cases never goes to zero for good. Who ever can leave has left. Some say that the city had 180,000 people, now only 30,000 remain.
Back in June, RFI reported that the local government announced that anyone who smuggles across the border and brings COVID into the town can be sentenced to death.
And no one has heard of it. A town of 180,000 people. Well 30,000 now.
In it, UN declared that
Based on an independent assessment of available information, […], the Special Rapporteur regards it as reasonable to conclude that forced labour among Uighur, Kazakh and other ethnic minorities in sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing has been occurring in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China.
And:
Similar arrangements have also been identified in the Tibet Autonomous Region,58 where an extensive labour transfer programme has shifted mainly farmers, herders and other rural workers into low-skilled and low-paid employment.
According to Sky News, Elon Musk writes column for Chinese Communist Party online censor agency’s magazine. If your Chinese is up to it, here is the twitter link with the photo of his article. So far, the article, in Chinese, is only in the paper version published by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s online regulator. The title is: “Believing technology will create a beautiful future.” and a quick translation is provided by Beijing Channel, a newsletter by a journalist from Xinhua News Agency.