Chinese are putting on the style

Press, 15 November 1984, Page 13

Chinese are putting on the style

From J

JONATHAN MIRSKY

in Peking

A Chinese swineherd has asked the Communist Party for sartorial advice with profound ideological implications: should he wear a western-style suit while mucking out his pigs? What is agitating the swineherd are directives such as the one last month from Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, calling for the Chinese to display their zeal for the Party’s reformist policies by wearing modem clothes. Modern means westernstyle. Modernisation, the current ese watchword, is what the swineherd is struggling to understand. Deng Xiaoping has set the year 2000 for quadrupled production, and predicted that within 50 years China will be an advanced country. But only if "Leftism,” the Dengist code for Maoism, is rejected, and modernisation is al-

lowed full play. Out, therefore, goes the highcollared tunic and matching trousers, which Westerners call the Mao-suit, and in comes the west-ern-style suit. New Party enthusiasms swing China from one extreme to the other. Chinese intellectuals, for instance, keep a set of weatherbeaten, patched clothes to hand, in case it suddenly becomes lifesaving to look proletarian again.

Western clothes sometimes are poison, sometimes The Thing. But what the Party always can count on is surface compliance. Urban swingers have been wearing tight

shirts, bell-bottoms, and dark glasses with the foreign stickers still on, for several years. Now the vegetable sellers near the foreigners’ ghetto are to be supplied with Western-style suits; so are the men who deliver soft drinks to the Friendship Store where foreigners and high-ranking Chinese buy desirable goods from abroad.

Three hundred Western suits are being sold daily in Peking’s main department store, according to recent reports. Such suits were much in evidence at the Central Committee meeting two weeks ago which

issued the 16,000 word document directing urban enterprises to become entrepreneurial, profit-seek-ing, and largely decentralised. Foreign knowledge was much praised. Only Deng Xiaoping clung to his button-on tunic, for 50 years the mark of austere nationalism.

For more Chinese, the only puzzle about these outward and visible manifestations of Party devotion is what comes next? Exactly a year ago the country was plunged into the campaign to combat Spiritual Pollution — or bourgeois pornography, as it was called. Young women with shoulderlength hair were stopped on the steps of Government buildings and ordered to make themselves decent with plaits. Form-revealing clothes were derided. A factory-worker was compelled to criticise himself for owning a Botticelli print;

Tibetan yak-herders were cautioned against the corrosive effects of Sartrean alienation.

For a month or two Deng’s adversaries rode high, employing these attacks on individualism to highlight their contempt for the rush to modernisation and from revolutionary ideals which emphasised Chinese self-reliance, and disdained foreign things. But the Dengists struck back. In January of this year, Party General Secretary Hu apologised to an audience for not wearing his West-ern-style suit. Hundreds of millions of Chinese got the message. “Looking beautiful and having fun” suddenly reappeared'in political vogue, which means long hair, lipstick, and discreetly-shaped clothes. Now even swineherds are worrying about style. Copyright — London Observer Service.