suits you Hu

Good call by the Melbourne Age on Hu Jintao’s parade attire:

Mr Hu was distinguished from his predecessor by being the only leader or former leader to wear a black buttoned-up Sun Yatsen suit (known in the West as a Mao suit) rather than a business suit.

Yeah, most reports had him as wearing a Mao suit. This matters because it ties in to wider considerations of what the celebrations where about and what message they were meant to send.

One thing that surprised me about the bash as a whole was that it was exclusive. Unlike the Olympics, where everybody was encouraged to get involved at some level, this was strictly for A listers. People whose windows overlooked the parade were forced to cover them up and watch it on TV. Thanks for all the hard work munchkins, but New China is our China; a Party thing. Back in the high Maoist days the social pressure would have been all the other way – towards compulsory joining in. The Party was the people and the Party’s party was the people’s party too (attendance compulsory).

This is where the Zhongshan suit comes in. It was originally adopted by Sun Yatsen as a visual code for what wider Chinese nationalism was about, combining the Western business suit with traditional Chinese court or formal attire. We’re Chinese, but we’re modern and we’re going to be doing things differently round here. It was a claim that the Communists were even more eager to adopt than the KMT. Sun wore the Zhongshan suit; Chiang Kai-shek wore it, Mao made it famous, and pretty much everybody in the Party followed him.

That ended in the eighties. Deng clung on to his Zhongshan suit but the people immediately below embraced the international corporate norm, often in a spirit of enthusiastic Westernization. Anyone else remember Hu Yaobang wearing what looked like one of Marks and Spencer’s finest while telling everybody to abandon chopsticks for proper western knives and forks?

The Zhongshan suit wasn’t so much old fashioned as retro futurist, the sign of a wrong turning or a turning never taken – it should have come with a personal jet pack. Party leaders still wore it now and again, but only when they had to honour the Party’s traditions.

That’s partly what Hu Jintao was doing the other day. But consider the hierarchy established here. The punters are out on the wrong side of the velvet rope. The cadres are on the inside, but as some anonymous mass. Presiding over them is the Politbureau in their two button single breasteds with snazzy ties. And presiding over them is Hu in his Zhongshan suit. Chinese modernity: it’s back and its bossing the parade.

UPDATE: just to make things clear here, I’m not having an attack of Jacquesism. The primary audience for this performance was internal and the hierarchy expressed that which is seen to be driving China’s own development. Economically, China is still following Deng’s dictum of ‘guarding against the right and opposing the left’ , IN social terms, you might call what I’ve described above “embracing modernity, guarding against Westernization’.

Incidentally. I always thought it a wasted opportunity that China’s leadership didn’t embrace modernization by dressing like Mods. I can see them all up there on the podium in their tonic suits and drainpipe strides, a little porkpie hat on each head. And that parade would have been much better with Prince Buster on the soundtrack. Or maybe this.

Comments

[Alex]

Incidentally. I always thought it a wasted opportunity that China’s leadership didn’t embrace modernization by dressing like Mods.

Now that I could get in with. Where's my streamline moderne 50hp li-ion electric scooter made in Shijazhuang, dammit?