773

The Collar Revolution: Everyday Clothing

in Guangdong as Resistance in the
Cultural Revolution*
Peidong Sun†

Abstract
Scholars have paid little attention to Maoist forces and legacies, and espe-
cially to the influences of Maoism on people’s everyday dress habits during
the Cultural Revolution. This article proposes that people’s everyday cloth-
ing during that time – a period that has often been regarded as the climax of
homogenization and asceticism – became a means of resistance and expres-
sion. This article shows how during the Cultural Revolution people dressed
to express resistance, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and to reflect
their motivations, social class, gender and region. Drawing on oral histories
collected from 65 people who experienced the Cultural Revolution and a
large number of photographs taken during that period, the author aims to
trace the historical source of fashion from the end of the 1970s to the
1980s in Guangdong province. In so doing, the author responds to theories
of socialist state discipline, everyday cultural resistance, individualism and
the nature of resistance under Mao’s regime.
Keywords: clothing; dress resistance; the Cultural Revolution; Guangdong

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Maoist
regime intervened deeply in the everyday life of Chinese people, especially during
the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). This paper examines everyday clothing
practices in China during the “ten year chaos” – an area that has received little
scholarly scrutiny despite the fact that dress is one of the most notable forms
of cultural expression. Although it has been argued that the Cultural
Revolution “froze fashion by increasing the desire to conform” in many cultural
domains,1 I maintain instead that it increased people’s desire to resist, giving
expression to diversity, individuality, gender distinction and geographical fusion.
An examination of everyday dress habits during the political movement will lead
to a better understanding of the legacies of Maoism in China’s cultural domain.
The diversity and individualism that burst forth in the late 1970s and that has

* This paper is translated from Chinese to English by Shan Windscript with Antonia Finnane.
† Department of history, Fudan University. Email: spd@fudan.edu.cn.
1 Obukhova, Zuckerman and Zhang 2014, 559.

© The China Quarterly, 2016 doi:10.1017/S0305741016000692 First published online 13 June 2016

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 774 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

grown ever since did not happen overnight, as is commonly assumed; as this
examination of apparel shows, its foundation was laid during the Cultural
Revolution.
In studies of contemporary China, little attention has been paid to the impact
of Maoism2 on ordinary life, and especially to how Maoist ideologies influenced
how people dressed during the Cultural Revolution.3 By and large, the Cultural
Revolution has been interpreted as a history of elite politics and mass move-
ments. Current scholarship on the Cultural Revolution still centres predominant-
ly on power struggles4 and mass movements5 – especially those of the workers,6
sent-down youth7 and the Red Guards8 – but says little about ordinary people’s
everyday life during this major political event.
Mainstream accounts typically portrayed the stereotyped homogeneity of
Mao-era clothing during the Cultural Revolution, describing Chinese people as
“blue ants,” perpetually clad in blue cotton clothing, shuttling back and forth
to their workplaces on a daily basis.9 For example, the everyday clothing in
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo (China, 1972),10 and Lucy Jarvis’ The
Forbidden City (1973)11 clearly portrays this stereotype.12 More recent works
have focused on the importance of the “everyday” in our understanding of the
Mao era, shedding new light on the crucial role of consumer goods and behav-
iour in a changing and reproducing social order.13
Compared to Shanghai, a place that has drawn much scholarly attention
thanks to the many published memoirs of the Cultural Revolution,14
Guangdong province has remained under-examined despite its unique geograph-
ical position. Owing to Guangdong’s proximity to Hong Kong, Macau and

2 I use Maoism to describe the practices of resistance that arose directly from a set of interrelated features
under Maoist rule. The everyday life of people living under authoritarian regimes with centralized eco-
nomic planning differs greatly from that of people in democratic societies with a market economy. For
studies of private life in Stalinist Russia that focus on the impact of Stalinism on individuals’ inner
worlds and family relations, see Hellbeck 2006; Figes 2007; Fitzpatrick and Lüdtke 2009. See
Demick 2009 for research on North Korea that places emphasis on the plight of people under Kim
Il-Sung’s regime, as evidenced by defectors. New research on the Third Reich has paid attention to
the spiritual oppression and exploitation of youth under Hitler (Klemperer 2000; Knopp 2002; Allert
2009.).
3 Pickowicz and Walder 2006 shows how political events changed ordinary people’s lives in urban and
rural society, and how they acted in turn, and provides a good insight into the Maoist forces and legacies
of the 1960s and 1970s.
4 MacFarquhar 1981; Wang, Nianyi 1988; Jin, Chunming 1995; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006;
Teiwes and Sun 2007; Liu, Qingfeng 1996; Guo, Wang and Han 2009; Dong and Walder 2011.
5 Wang, Shaoguang 1995a.
6 Perry and Li 1997; Li, Xun 2015.
7 Bonnin 2010.
8 Walder 2009; Chan 1985; Rosen 1981; Lee 1978; Tang 2003; He 2010. The sixth volume of The History
of the People’s Republic of China (1949–1981), which focuses on the Cultural Revolution, provides no
information on the daily lives of ordinary people. See Li, Danhui, and Shi 2008.
9 Guillain 1957, 1–19.
10 Antonioni 1972.
11 Jarvis 1973.
12 Liu, Zhijun 2002, 39.
13 Wang, Shaoguang 1995b; Lei 2000; Xu, Bei 2006.
14 Jin, Dalu 2011.

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 The Collar Revolution 775

Taiwan, and because of its links to those places through the Canton Fair, its pol-
itics, economy and culture have been influenced by the West to a greater degree
than any other place in mainland China. This permeability creates the context
and the possibility for other expressions of individualization and difference that
I will discuss in the following sections. Elsewhere, I have examined Guangdong
people’s everyday clothes and fashion during the Cultural Revolution,15 and
“bizarre clothes” with respect to state discipline at that time.16
Although mainstream ideologies significantly determined dress codes, the
degree of resistance in the way people dressed within their established norms dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution should not be underestimated: over the course of the
revolution, people’s understanding of beauty and fashion pluralized and persona-
lized. This paper aims to provide new dimensions to current understandings of
the Cultural Revolution by focusing on the neglected topic of everyday dress.
Based on a study of Guangdong province, it first examines the influence of
Maoism on clothing between the 1960s and 1970s, revealing the historical foun-
dations of the creative burst of Chinese fashion from the end of the 1970s to the
1980s. Second, it responds to theories related to socialist state discipline, everyday
cultural resistance, individualism and the nature of resistance under Mao’s
regime. I argue that a reconsideration of people’s everyday clothing practices dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution reveals that the agency for individual resistance and
expressions of diversity at the grassroots was in fact much greater, even during
the heyday of the Mao era, than previously believed.

Research Method and Sources

Primary data for this paper were gathered from semi-structured in-depth inter-
views with 65 registered Guangdong residents. The interviews explored how indi-
viduals used clothing as a means of resistance during the Cultural Revolution, the
specific social contexts that shaped their behaviour, and their subjective percep-
tions of their social contexts. My informants had all worked or studied in
Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution, and were chosen for this study
using “life history case studies”17 and “birth cohort theory.”18 Most were born
between the 1930s and 1950s. There were 33 male and 32 female participants.
They were drawn from 15 of Guangdong’s 21 prefecture-level cities. In order
to maximize the range of cases across age, gender, education, occupation and
location, they have been methodically sorted. Between March 2005 and
October 2006, I conducted one to two interviews per person, with each interview
lasting about one to two hours. Most of the photographs used in this paper were

15 Sun 2012.
16 Sun 2010.
17 Denzin 1978.
18 Ryder 1965.

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 776 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

provided by the interviewees. Some of the photos were provided by the Integrated
Education Gallery of the Sun Yat-sen University library.19

Dress Resistance
“There is no power without potential refusal or revolt.”20 Everyday dress resist-
ance is often manifested in small actions that are “unorganised, unsystematic and
individual, opportunistic and self-indulgent.”21 Such resistance is described by
Michel de Certeau as a “tactic” that is “an art of the weak;” in the everyday con-
text, individuals can use “popular tactics” to articulate their acts of resistance.22
Whereas both de Certeau and James Scott look at resistance and weapons of
the weak in societies marked by inequality and exclusion (either class differences
in advanced capitalism or in colonial/post-colonial rural societies), I wish to
apply their ideas about resistance to a society filled with both “agents and vic-
tims” whose roles were fluid and in constant flux.23
On the one hand, dress resistance in the Cultural Revolution is marked by a
sense of visibility. People complied with mainstream dress conventions during
the Cultural Revolution because acting in line with the dominant political and
ideological orders gave them a sense of security, much as they used revolutionary
names: “more popular and thus safer.”24 Clothing was also a cultural practice of
everyday resistance: personalized, gendered and rationalized clothing practices
such as altering the sleeves, collars, waists and trouser leg openings can be seen
as major expressions of people’s resistance.
On the other hand, people may have been adopting the subtle forms of contest-
ation we see in the “weapons of the weak” but without knowing exactly whose
exercise of power they needed to resist and against whom they needed to protect
themselves. The Cultural Revolution created a mutually injurious society (huhai
shehui 互害社会), where different forces took turns to wield power and the
boundaries between victim and perpetrator were permeable. People who could
be persecuted owing to inappropriate clothing behaviour included Red Guards,
village headmen, production team leaders, workplace leaders, union presidents,
neighbours, colleagues, peers, friends and even spouses and children.
Expressions of resistance had to remain not only more subtle but potentially
even more “ambiguous” than in the cases named by Scott and de Certeau.25
Ambiguous expressions of resistance can actually protect those who resist by
allowing them to deny that they were in fact engaged in any type of subversion
or critique.

19 See the library’s website at: http://202.116.65.75/web/EN/home. Accessed 10 May 2016.

20 Foucault 1981, 253.
21 Scott 2008, 50.
22 De Certeau 1984, 26–37.
23 Siu 1989.
24 Obukhova, Zuckerman and Zhang 2014, 576.
25 Thornton 2002.

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 The Collar Revolution 777

Dress resistance in the Cultural Revolution was conditioned by a sense of pol-

itical uncertainty under Maoist rule, which was also a major source of people’s
feelings of insecurity.26 Therefore, people’s dress resistance was a silent and subtle
undertaking rather than an overt form of political action or confrontation.
However, as my informants asserted during our interviews, they felt that their
choice of clothing silently “spoke” to the public. Everyday dress resistance, like
Hakim Bey’s “nomadology,” provided my informants with a “temporary
autonomous zone,” that is, a site of individual resistance for “an era in which
the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with
cracks and vacancies.”27 In short, everyday dress resistance under Maoist social-
ism was a persistent phenomenon. Although its effectiveness was limited, it
should not be neglected. Oppressed in a climate of political uncertainty, people’s
strategically performed acts of resistance could bring them a sense of autonomy
and individuality.

Defying Economic Deprivation: the Invention and Use of the

Detachable-Collar Shirt, Gunnysack Shirt, and Fertilizer Trousers
Three factors were behind the monotony of everyday clothing during the Cultural
Revolution: economic deprivation, political discipline and moral punishment.28
Economic deprivation led to uniformity of clothing as, without material
resources and bound by social and political rules, people were limited in their
freedom to choose what to wear and had to rely on their own resourcefulness
and imagination. Therefore, dress resistance was, first and foremost, a reaction
against material scarcity.
The emergence and popularity of detachable-collar shirts in Chinese cities and
towns reflected ordinary people’s desire for “face” even at a time when money
was short. It was also called the “economic collar” ( jingji ling 经济领) or “thrifty
collar” ( jieyue ling 节约领). It consisted of a half-collar shirt with two shoulder
strap attachments that were there to avoid any possible embarrassment arising
from the use of an easily dislodged detachable collar. One of the interviewees,
who worked as a bench worker at a car repair factory during the Cultural
Revolution, recalled an embarrassing moment when talking about his wedding
day:
I got married in August. The weather was hot. After I brought the bride home, I took off my
lapel-collar suit coat ( fanling wen zhuang 翻领文装) because I felt very hot. Then people saw my
detachable-collar shirt. They all started laughing at me; my wife started to cry, refusing to enter
the “bridal chamber” with me. My mother-in-law was scolding me, saying I’d never worn any-
thing but cheap work clothes when we were dating, too. How embarrassing! I felt like a drown-
ing mouse!29

26 Sun 2013, 91–118.

27 Bey 1991, 101.
28 Sun 2010.
29 Interview with retired worker, Guangzhou, November 2006.

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 778 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

Detachable collar shirts were popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They
looked good and were easy to wash. They also saved on fabric. Typical attire
for men at that time was a plain coloured, detachable-collar shirt under a hand-
knitted sweater; for women, the detachable-collar shirt was often made of floral
fabric. In short, detachable-collar shirts are an indication of how individuals used
available sartorial resources to construct their individual identities and to shape
their self-esteem in specific social contexts.
The gunnysack shirt was invented by rural cadres who exploited limited local
resources to their own advantage. The cadres were able to obtain gunnysacks, a
rare local source of fabric, from their production teams (shengchandui 生产队).
They ripped out the seams of the gunnysacks and re-fashioned them into
Chinese-style shirts with two big pockets at the waist. A primary school principal
in Guangdong witnessed three ranks of cadres (commune cadres, team cadres
and village cadres) attending a conference, all wearing gunnysack shirts: “If
you saw someone wearing a gunnysack shirt, you would know that he must be
a ranking cadre. It was a sign of power and prestige!”30 Apart from rural cadres,
urban blue-collar workers also wore gunnysack shirts. A man who worked as a
porter at the Guangzhou Machinery Factory during the Cultural Revolution
recalled that, “We porters also used rice gunnysacks to make clothes. This type
of material was durable, warm, and saved on the use of cotton. It even saved
on material for protective sleeves. You could say that it gave you three things
for the price of one.”31
For rural cadres and urban porters alike, wearing gunnysack shirts was an
expedient response to the shortage of fabrics and cloth coupons. The gunnysack
shirt is a demonstration of the flexibility and capacity for innovation on the part
of ordinary people within the limitations imposed by their material conditions. At
the same time, shirts made from hemp sacks came to be an indication of the wear-
er’s position in the political order and their corresponding social identities.
The emergence of fertilizer trousers was related to China’s chemical import
projects. After the Lin Biao Incident 林彪事件 in 1971, the Central Committee
adjusted their policies of ultra-leftism; also in the same year, the PRC took its
seat in the United Nations, leading to an increase in international contact.
Following US President Nixon’s visit, Western countries began to establish con-
nections with China and foreign trade and international economic cooperation
proliferated. In the new national and international political economic climate,
advanced petrochemical technology was introduced to China in an effort to
solve the country’s clothing issues. With the support of the vice-premier, Li
Xiannian 李先念, four chemical fibre projects and 13 fertilizer projects were
launched. The main fertilizer was urea (carbamide) imported from Japan.32

30 Interview with retired middle school director, Guangzhou, November 2006.

31 Interview with retired worker, Guangzhou, October 2006.
32 Shan 2001, 587.

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 The Collar Revolution 779

In rural Guangdong, urea was assigned to local supply and sales cooperatives
in bags made of chemical fibre nylons, similar in texture to cotton silk. At the
time, a family’s annual allocation of cloth coupons was not adequate to clothe
the whole family. Commune and team cadres therefore used various means to
purchase the fertilizer bags from the supply and sales cooperatives to make
clothes. Each bag cost about four cents, and two bags were enough to make a
pair of trousers. Many commune cadres wore trousers made of these fertilizer
bags, winning admiring and envious looks from the peasants.
Envy was accompanied by humour. The front and back of the fertilizer bags
were marked with words such as “urea” and “Japanese xx corporation.” When
the bags were made into trousers, the words appeared around the waistband of
the trousers and were very prominent. The effect is recorded in popular jingles
of the time: “Japan is in the front, urea at the back; behold the crotch, nitrogen
– 45 per cent!” (Qianmian shi Riben, houmian shi niaosu; zaiwang dangli kan, han
dan liang 45%! 前面是日本, 后面是尿素; 再往裆里看, 含氮量 45%!). And, again:
“Little commune cadres all in nylon trousers/Japan is in the front, urea at the
back/ Some dyed black, others dyed blue/ for commune members none at all”
(Gongshe xiaoganbu, chuanzhe ninlong ku. Qianmian Riben chan, houmian shi
niaosu. Ranheide, ranlande, jiu shi meiyou sheyuande 公社小干部, 穿着尼龙
裤。前面日本产, 后面是尿素。染黑的, 染蓝的, 就是没有社员的).33
Fertilizer trousers, like gunnysack shirts, were invented by rural cadres as mar-
kers of social identity to differentiate themselves from ordinary peasants in every-
day contexts. It shows that those with special access to items were able to “wear”
that access to signal their power in the centrally planned economy. I argue that in
the 1970s, the Cultural Revolution had created a great levelling between cadres
and the masses, and between managers and workers, across all workplaces.
Such clothing strategies, ridiculous as they may sound today, were used by
local political elites to construct their identities. In addition, fertilizer trousers
provided a window to modernity for rural Chinese people in the 1970s. The
fact that a mere fertilizer package was made of soft and comfortable nylon fabric
gave rise to speculation about the wealth of Japan and the West, in contrast to
mainland China where even material for clothing was extremely scarce.
The above three cases show some of the ways in which clothing became a site
of resistance in people’s everyday life, and a means by which social actors could
build their identities. Constrained by the political system, individuals could be
strategically obedient, or they could make a variety of conscious choices, by
using their initiative and coming up with inventions. These inventions reflect
the cleverness and humour of the people in Guangdong at that time, as well as
expressing their preoccupation with the exercise of social power and identity
formation.

33 Interview with retired cadre, Guangzhou, November 2006.

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 780 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

Resisting Political Discipline: the “Colour Revolution” and Personalized

Dress
For most of the 65 interviewees, the olive-green army uniform was seen to be the
desirable outfit during the Cultural Revolution. But, a few of them – even people
belonging to the five red categories – explicitly resisted, or showed contempt for,
the uniform. One interviewee, who was a shipyard worker in Guangzhou, said
that he had never worn an army uniform or army cap, and when his younger
brother gave him one as a gift, he sent it to be dyed blue at a dye house.34
His dislike of army uniforms arose from something that happened to his
co-worker during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, the trousers they were
allocated all had wide crotches, which many young workers found ugly. Those
with sewing machines at home were able to alter the trousers to ensure a better
fit. The interviewee’s co-worker altered the bottoms of his trousers to make
them skinnier. Red Guards confiscated and destroyed his trousers, and wrote
big character posters to criticize his “rotten bourgeois” thinking. After that,
the interviewee felt antagonistic towards army uniforms and the people who
wore them. In his view, clothes and fashion in the Cultural Revolution originated
from the “new fundamentalism” of the extreme Mao cult. During that “dark
age,” army uniforms conformed to the revolutionary trend but in his view
were ridiculous. Having put himself at odds with the current line being propa-
gated, he dreaded the potential consequences if it were discovered that he had
dyed his army uniform blue. When a green army uniform was dyed blue-grey,
it looked similar to a navy uniform; and at the shipyard where he had worked,
from the director down to the workers, many people were navy veterans and
wore navy uniforms. The interviewee obtained a certain psychological security
from wearing a blue-grey navy uniform.
This case reveals that in a society where individuals’ private living spaces are
closely monitored by political forces, their forms and means of resistance are dif-
ferent to those in a market economy society. In China during the Cultural
Revolution, clothing, as a form of visual text that is directly visible, became a
tool by which Chinese individuals struggled for self-expression and representa-
tion.35 By dressing in accordance or discordance with the mainstream norm,
ordinary Chinese people expressed their acceptance of or opposition to the exist-
ing order. In doing so, they effectively challenged the dominant dress discourse
dictated by the larger socio-political force. The deliberate colour manipulation
was indeed a way of expressing resistance.
Personalized dress was a reaction to the national suppression of “bizarre
clothes.” On 7 June 1964, the Liberation Daily published an article to spark
mass debate about, and mass criticism of, the wearing of strange clothes, declar-
ing that such attire was a manifestation of an “unhealthy lifestyle” and a vulgar

34 Ibid.
35 Ai and Bu 2009.

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 The Collar Revolution 781

Figure 1: Cun zai in Suits

Source:
Photographed by his relative in Guangzhou 1972, offered by the interviewee.

reflection of “decadent, declining bourgeois ideology.”36 After this nationwide

mass debate and criticism, unconventional clothes gradually disappeared from
people’s daily lives. Under this political pressure, the nation established an aes-
thetic of “only the political is beautiful” (zhengzhi wei mei zhuyi 政治唯美主义),
to make people oppose unconventional clothes and legitimate the criticism of
people’s clothing choices in the name of class struggle.37
One interviewee who admitted that he was ahead of his time and bold in his
attire, was criticized for being cun zai 寸仔(Cantonese for bad person) by his
classmates and teacher because he once wore clothes he received as gifts from
his Hong Kong relatives. Wearing black straight-legged jeans and a bright blue
T-shirt made him the subject of criticism by the school authorities who viewed
him as a “negative example.” But he admitted that those clothes made him
feel good and vigorous. He believed that dress choice should be a personal free-
dom, and should not be interfered with. He recounted one heroic act with much
pride: in 1972, he ventured to a photographic studio, opened by his relative, to
have his picture taken wearing a bright red tie given to him by his relatives in
Hong Kong, even though he knew that people were not allowed to wear ties at
that time.38
Some other interviewees recalled how they had racked their brains for ways in
which they could alter their work uniforms in order to convey a sense of person-
ality and taste. For a while, the trend among factory workers was to wear blue
work clothes. One worker used a piece of wood to give her jeans a scrubbed
look. She always found ways to make her clothes more “form-fitting” in order
to show off her figure.39 In a centrally planned economy that produces a limited
range of clothing, individualization can itself be a form of resistance to the

36 Sun 2010.
37 Ibid.
38 Interview with retired worker, Guangzhou, October 2006.
39 Zhai 2008, 261.

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 782 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

existing power structure – although this would not necessarily be the case with
individualization in a liberal capitalist society.
According to Yunxiang Yan, Maoist China was “the first stage in the Chinese
path to individualization,” when the Chinese people came “out of the shadow of
the ancestors but re-molded as a rust-less screw” in the collectivist programmes of
social engineering; the “individuality, independence, and desires of the Chinese
individual at the tail end of Maoist China were both weakened and strengthened
to certain degrees.”40Although people’s private lives were dominated by Maoism,
my interviewees in general sought to carve out a space for self, individualism and
personal aesthetic views.
The dissatisfaction expressed by the three interviewees above with the dress
order of the Cultural Revolution is indicative of two things. First, none of
them fully abided by the highly homogenizing dress conventions that promoted
uniformity and denied individuality. Second, the ways in which they sought to
personalize their clothes show that individualism and aesthetic instinct still
existed in their manner of dress. They paid attention to their private lives, imply-
ing the existence of subjectivity. Here, management of private life had become an
effective means for resisting public power.

Resisting Moral Punishment: Gendered Clothes and the “Revolution on

the Collar”
Ordinary life during the Maoist era, as epitomized by women’s clothing in the
Cultural Revolution, has been regarded as a climax of masculinization and pur-
itanical asceticism.41 It is therefore not difficult to understand why some scholars
consider Chinese women’s interest in beauty and fashion as a new, post-Mao phe-
nomenon.42 Jean Kunz posits that, since the Cultural Revolution, beauty and
fashion have been defined by the dominant political ideologies; beauty and fash-
ion were singularized and people’s creativity was suppressed before being reacti-
vated by the economic reforms of the 1980s.43 Under the new, proletarian
morality of the PRC, the CCP denigrated women who did not abide by the con-
ventions of revolutionary dress, labelling them as deviant (bu zhengjing 不正经),
dishonest (bu laoshi 不老实), flirtatious ( fengsao 风骚), vain (aimu xurong 爱慕虚荣),
fox spirits (hulijing 狐狸精) who worship foreign things, or bourgeois ladies (zichan-
jieji xiaojie 资产阶级小姐).
However, Hung-Yok Ip questions the idea that women’s interest in and pursuit
of beauty is a newly developed trend of the post-Mao era, and argues that, “an
interest in feminine beauty … was always present in the [Chinese] revolutionary
process,” and the strategic use of appearance was important for revolutionary

40 Yan 2010, 493–94.

41 Honig and Hershatter 1988, 11; Yang 1999, 35–67.
42 Yang 1999; Croll 1995, 151–52; Evans 1997, 82; Honig and Hershatter 1988, 41–51
43 Kunz 1996.

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 The Collar Revolution 783

politics.44 Tina Mai Chen discusses how Mao suits and military uniforms helped
to produce a new subjectivity under the new socio-political system from 1949 to
1966.45 Antonia Finnane examines clothes and fashion in the Cultural
Revolution from the perspectives of gender, class and nationalism, revealing
that fashion has been an important part of Chinese people’s everyday life since
the late imperial period.46 Even in the revolutionary era, Chinese women still
managed to find ways to resist what my respondents termed the androgenization
of clothing implemented by the party-state.
Fashion is a means of artistic and political expression. The use of tattoos can
be understood as an opposition to the commodification of bodies.47 As such, the
collar revolution during the decade of turmoil can be seen as Chinese women’s
opposition to the homogenizing and oppressive dress order by revealing their
unique senses of gender- and self-identity. In Dongguan 东莞, one interviewee
recalled that zhiqing 知青 (sent-down youth) women especially liked to alter
their collars, from V-shaped, square and pointed collars to the more fashionable
round-shaped, stand-up, boat and wing collars. For Chinese men, turned-down
collars, turtleneck and stand-up collars were fashionable preferences.48 A 1975
photograph of a group of zhiqing women taken in Yuexi 粤西, Guangdong,
proves that the wing-collar was very popular among the female zhiqing
community.49
The ways in which women from different social classes manifested resistance to
Cultural Revolutionary norms, and the intensity of the resistance, varied. In her
memoir, Zhang Hanzhi 章含之, a translator at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
recalls: “I always wanted to do something different with my clothes. Before
attending a UN meeting once, I picked a piece of turquoise-coloured fabric –
no one else would have chosen that [at the time] – and had it made into a
coat, with a round collar instead of a square one. I also added a grey detachable
fur collar.”50 Zhang was criticized on this account and labelled as “unconven-
tional and individualistic” (biao xin liyi 标新立异). However, she was not
deterred. In the lobby of the Great Hall of the People, there was a mirror next
to the cloakroom. After hanging up her coat, she always checked herself in the
mirror before entering the conference venue. This made her the target of criticism
for engaging in bourgeois activities. In fact, the dress resistance practised by
Zhang was something beyond the realm of possibility for ordinary people.
Before being appointed as a translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by

44 Ip 2003, 330. Fashion (self-adornment as disguise) could be useful for the CCP’s underground activities,
and dressing up could help revolutionaries carry out their mission and to construct a positive image of
the CCP. See Ip 2003.
45 Chen 2001.
46 Finnane 2008.
47 Fisher 2002.
48 Interview with retired local official, Guangzhou, August 2006.
49 See group photo of female zhiqing advanced delegation of congress, photographed by Zhou Zeming in
Maoming 1975, at the Integrated Education Gallery of the Sun Yat-sen University library.
50 Zhang, Hanzhi 1994, 88–99.

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 784 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

Mao Zedong in 1971, Zhang had been his English teacher for seven years.
Ordinary people would have been criticized and denounced or would have lost
their lives for donning the sort of “unconventional” clothes she wore.51
During the Cultural Revolution, the collar was also used as a symbol of iden-
tity for brides. Although women wore dark coloured outfits on their wedding
day, they used pink collars to intimate their newlywed status.52 In addition,
women refashioned their sleeves, altering ordinary long sleeves into puff (灯笼
袖 denglong xiu), bell (喇叭袖 laba xiu), ruffle (泡泡袖 paopao xiu) and petal
sleeves (花瓣袖 huaban xiu).
There is a long history of altering collars and sleeves to convey a sense of indi-
vidual and gender identity within the framework of the CCP’s highly politicized
“red aesthetics.” On Women’s Day in Yan’an 延安 in 1940, more than 500 stu-
dents from the Chinese Women’s University performed a dance wearing Lenin
suits that they had tailored themselves. This created a great stir in Yan’an at a
time when everyone, from Party members to students, wore the Eighth Route
Army uniforms.53 Using the collar as sign of struggle, people reacted to the
state’s overt moulding of the masses, appropriating and manipulating available
symbols into oppositional forces. Collars and sleeves symbolized a personal, pri-
vate space where people could entertain “an illusion of power and control.”54
They desired a free, easy and even sentimental private life rather than a pan-
politicized everyday existence centred on class struggle.
Women also used hair-ribbons and hair clips to express their sense of self. One
interviewee recounted that she had devoted much time to thinking about how to
make her hair look different. She also designed and made colourful hair strings.
A photograph she provided shows her in a short haircut, parted on the side from
the left to the right in an attempt to create a sort of asymmetrical style, with a
little pigtail fastened on the top-right side of her head. The hair tie she used to
fasten the pigtail was made by herself, using threads she had teased from her
worn-out floral-patterned clothes – presents she had received from her Hong
Kong relatives.55
Women with more financial resources could afford colourful hair clips to
adorn themselves with. Their short revolutionary haircuts were often cleverly
and nicely decorated with hair clips.56 The hegemonic revolutionary taste had
not extinguished people’s desire to express themselves and their tastes, and
they would find all kinds of ways to do just that by using jacket coverings, zip-
pers, white masks,57 and even glass fibres.58

51 Sun 2010.
52 Deng 2008, 124.
53 Xu, Lan 1999, 253.
54 Kuhn 1999, 285.
55 Interview with retired worker, Guangzhou, October 2006.
56 Deng 2008, 123.
57 Qing 2006, 44.
58 Zhu 2006.

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 The Collar Revolution 785

During the Cultural Revolution, dresses and skirts were introduced to the
Chinese public via officially sanctioned political gatherings and celebrations. In
1974, China participated for the first time in the Asian Games, held that year
in Tehran, Iran. At the opening ceremony, the Chinese women athletes entered
the stadium wearing the Jiang Qing 江青 dress. This type of dress retained traces
of a uniform, but because it was a frock and generally made of a soft material like
imitation silk or satin cotton, it tended to show the curves of the female body
shape.59 Jiang Qing’s sufficient political privileges empowered her to “revolution-
ize” Chinese women’s fashion – within certain boundaries. Her venture into
design reveals the scarcely perceptible growth of women’s gender awareness in
the revolutionary age.60
Furthermore, the local government of Guangdong permitted women to wear
dresses when welcoming foreign guests. One interviewee told me a story about
his Indonesian cousin, who was a secondary school student in Guangzhou during
the Cultural Revolution. She and her classmates were required by their school to
wear skirts when greeting foreign guests. Some of her classmates had to borrow
hers in order to comply with this rule.61
Clothes often serve as a barometer of a country’s political atmosphere, and as
such, skirts and dresses were the weather vanes for women’s fashion in Mao-era
China. The rise of the Soviet-style “Blazy” dress (布拉吉 bulaji) in China was
closely related to the state of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1950s. The changing col-
lars, the re-emergence of skirts and dresses, and the colours and patterns of shirts
could effectively reflect public perceptions of political, economic and social life in
later decades. Guangdong people’s everyday dress habits demonstrated that while
the larger clothing culture of the time hindered people from freely expressing their
identities and individualities, collars, sleeves, waists and trouser-legs provided
them with spaces in which their acts of resistance could occur.

Resisting Geographical Barriers: the Inflows of Foreign Dress and

Fashion
Individual clothing resistance in Guangdong was possible in large part because of
the province’s geographical proximity to Hong Kong, and because it was the site
of the Canton Fair,62 which gave sporadic but targeted official permission to the
(at least temporary) adoption of Hong Kong/Western/foreign goods for the sake
of increasing trade.63 It also exposed Guangzhou residents to a variety of

59 Zhang, Hong 2004.

60 Ibid.
61 Interview with retired university professor, Guangzhou. October 2006.
62 A biannual trade fair founded in Guangzhou in 1957, the Canton Fair continued to attract foreign busi-
nessmen to China throughout Cultural Revolution. They brought with them not only trading opportun-
ities but also exotic clothing.
63 By the 1960s and 1970s, the Party had adopted a policy that explicitly advocated “adopting long-term
plans and making full use of acquiring foreign currencies for importing equipment sets and gears.” See
Ma 1979.

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 786 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

Figure 2: Family Picture

Source:
Photographed by Ruxiong Liang in Guangzhou 1968, Integrated Education Gallery of the Sun Yat-sen University library.

sartorial possibilities and stylistic innovations64 that, in a sense, may have pro-
vided them with a ready-made toolkit of “repertoires of resistance” from which
to draw.65
To the people of Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and also Taiwan were no
doubt windows on to the world of fashion. Figure 2 shows a Guangdong/
Hong Kong family photo taken at the Yanfang Photographic Studio in
Guangdong before the 1968 Spring Festival. Three generations of 22 family
members are shown, variously sitting and standing. One can identify where
they are from just by looking at the clothes they are wearing: those with rather
conservative hairstyles and stern facial expressions who are wearing
Chinese-style tunic suits with Mao badges pinned to their chests are apparently
from Guangdong; in contrast, those who are in Western-style suits with scarves
tied around their necks are the relatives from Hong Kong.
Figure 3 shows another photograph of daily life in Guangzhou, taken during
the later period of the Cultural Revolution, where one can sense the influence of
Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. The young woman in the photograph is wear-
ing a pullover sweater with bell-bottoms (laba ku 喇叭裤), looking quite stylish

64 In the 1950s and 1960s, the Guangzhou municipal government and Guangdong provincial government
often invited delegations from Hong Kong and Macau to attend the Chinese National Day celebrations.
In the 1960s, the total number of Hong Kong visitors to mainland China averaged 347,000; that number
slightly decreased to 253,198 in 1967 and 1968, but from 1970 began to grow again. See Zhang, Baojun,
and Zhao 1997.
65 Tilly 1991.

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 The Collar Revolution 787

Figure 3: Citizens Visit a Park

Source:
Photographed by Minsheng Meng in Guangzhou 1975, Integrated Education Gallery of the Sun Yat-sen University library.

even by today’s standard. Other women in the photograph are wearing shirts that
feature slightly wider-cut necks. The colours and decorative patterns of their
skirts were criticized as “bourgeois patterns” (zichanjieji huawen 资产阶级花纹)
at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
Among the 65 interviewees, 49 of them, that is, 75.38 per cent, said that they or
their family members had received clothes as gifts from Hong Kong, Macau,
Taiwan, the USA or South-East Asian countries during the Cultural Revolution.
According to these data, Guangdong maintained a relatively high level of clothing
exchange with the outside world. Clothing from outside of Guangdong, which was
more stylish than the local clothing and made of better quality fabric, presented a
cultural challenge to China, throwing down the gauntlet to the revolutionary fash-
ion that predominated in the province.
At a time when the street scene in mainland China was dominated by highly
politicized revolutionary clothing, Guangdong’s encounter with foreign fashion
elements made the province a special place in the country, where everyday cloth-
ing styles looked quite different to those of inland Chinese cities. Until the end of
the 1970s, when family members who lived outside the mainland returned to visit
Shanghai, they brought with them clothes as gifts for relatives.66 On 16 May
1976, as the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Cultural Revolution was
being celebrated across the nation, Guangdong’s political atmosphere was notice-
ably different. For example, a photograph taken in Harbin shows hundreds of
thousands of people celebrating the anniversary together, conveying a strong

66 Cai 2008, 103.

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 788 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

Figure 4: Parade in Harbin

Source:
Photographed by Zhensheng Li in Harbin 1976, Integrated Education Gallery of the Sun Yat-sen University library.

Figure 5: Parade in Guangdong

Source:
Photographed by Zeming Zhou in Guangzhou/Gaozhou 1976, Integrated Education Gallery of the Sun Yat-sen University library.

political atmosphere (Figure 4). The first two rows of the podium are occupied by
officials. Under the podium steps, six soldiers stand with their hands behind their
backs, facing the podium with their backs to the masses. Several fully armed sol-
diers stand guard on the rally ground; behind them is a sea of people, the revo-
lutionary masses. In contrast, a picture taken on the same day at the Army and
People’s Commemoration Rally (Figure 5), jointly organized by Guangzhou and
Gaozhou 高州, shows more than 20 female students walking past a podium wear-
ing red scarves and holding flowers. Some of them are wearing frocks, others
skirts, all in different colours and patterns, with more than a dozen decorative
designs. In another photograph, taken in Gaozhou on the same day, three girls
holding a banner walking in the front are all wearing skirts. Many bystanders

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 The Collar Revolution 789

among the crowd, however, are barefoot, wearing straw hats or holding umbrel-
las (also Figure 5). Even when taking the contrast in local climates into account,
the difference between Harbin and Guangzhou is profound.
What the overseas relatives of Guangdong residents brought into their lives
were more than just some colourful, fancy second-hand clothes. They also
brought the possibility of a different lifestyle in a different society, prompting
people to think about what freedom, individuality and “self” meant. “Alien”
(tazhe 他者) clothes also meant an alternative (linglei 另类) fashion for
Guangdong people. Many interviewees said that their wedding outfits were
bought in Hong Kong, or given to them as gifts by their Hong Kong relatives.
The colour, style and quality of their imported wedding outfits would attract
much attention and admiration from their local communities. People could not
help but think that, “[Guangzhou and Hong Kong] are so close. How come
things from Hong Kong are so much better than ours? How come we don’t
have them here?”67 In short, Guangdong’s unique geographical location is one
important external factor that has contributed to the contrast between
Guangdong’s clothes and fashion and those of other, inland Chinese provinces.
Having been subjected to more foreign influences than other parts of China,
many people in Guangdong had the opportunity to make alternative fashions
a point of reference for everyday clothing. In contrast, inland Chinese people
had little exposure to foreign cultures during the Cultural Revolution and as a
result their overall clothing styles tended to be much less diversified than those
of Guangdong.
The four types of dress resistance that I have discussed are interrelated. No
authority was left unchallenged; rather, it would always face resistance and strug-
gle from individuals or groups. There are many reasons for, and forms of, dress
resistance. What I have discussed here are individual means of resistance to eco-
nomic deprivation, to political discipline, to moral punishment and to geograph-
ical isolation.

Conclusion and Discussion

On the surface, clothing and fashion in the first three years (1966–1969) of the
Cultural Revolution appear to have been hegemonic. The mainstream dress pre-
ferences of the time were army uniforms, work uniforms, Zhongshan 中山 suits,
Red Guard uniforms and Lenin suits.68 However, this article has demonstrated
that while clothes and fashion may have indeed seemed to be unvarying between
1966 and 1976, there were also undercurrents of resistant forces beneath the sur-
face. Such forces of resistance paved the way for the radical fashion explosion in
China in the 1980s. Many of the “new fashions” that burst onto the scene at the
end of the 1970s were nothing more than the existing unofficially recognized

67 Interview with retired female worker, Guangzhou, November 2006.

68 Sun 2012.

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 790 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

everyday clothes practices that ordinary people had been quietly carrying out in
the 1960s and 1970s. Everyday dress resistance during the Cultural Revolution
showed its profound accumulative consequences later: “Things brewed in the
Seventies, blossomed in the Eighties, and bore fruit in the Nineties.”69
The conclusion of this article is two-fold. First, the unique geographical loca-
tion of Guangdong province played an important role in softening or weakening
the dominant political power over local people’s everyday life, prompting a cloth-
ing culture that was more diverse than that in other places where people could not
express their “hidden desires.” Second, Guangdong people’s dress revolution was
carried out by using everyday clothing as a means of resistance. Dress resistance
is an expression of opposition to the existing dress order and a way of expressing
diversity, individuality, gender distinction and geographical fusion. By challen-
ging the mainstream ideology and the power of conventional dress culture/polit-
ical or revolutionary culture, Guangdong people’s dress revolution carved out a
new space for cultural resistance practices or a new transgressive culture.
How could there be dress resistance under an authoritarian political system
and planned economy? First, it had something to do with people’s changing iden-
tities and their explorations of subjectivity. Personal identity has been an all-
consuming concern for the Chinese government. In 1949, the CCP urged
Chinese people to decide their own fate and thereby take control of the fate of
the nation. In the 1950s, the Party began systematically to institutionalize and
standardize social constructions. By the 1960s, the Chinese subjectivity which
the Party itself had created had become problematic. The memorable Cultural
Revolution slogan, “down with the Yanwang 阎王 (King of Hell), liberating
the small devils,” meant that people from all revolutionary classes could oppose
and challenge the institutional structures that had constrained their lives. As a
result, “heterodox currents of thought” (yiduan sichao 异端思潮) emerged one
after another during the Cultural Revolution.70 Dress was one of the most con-
venient tools people could use to express their various senses of “self.”
Second, compared to the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP’s con-
trol over public opinion slightly relaxed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This paved
the way for the fashion liberation and revival that took place in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. In the early 1970s, while the CCP on the one hand still advocated that
personal consumption should adhere to the “revolutionary” and “collective” princi-
ples, on the other hand it stressed that revolutionary and collective principles did not
mean over-simplification.71 Meanwhile, China’s international circumstances began
to improve. The large-scale import of foreign technologies and equipment led to
an improvement in the quality of people’s clothing, and ultimately laid a solid foun-
dation for resolving people’s food and clothing problems in the 1980s.72

69 Li, Ling 2008, 248.

70 Wang, Shaoguang, et al. 2013.
71 Shang 1972.
72 Shan 2001, 587.

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 The Collar Revolution 791

Third, the emergence and development of fibre technology provided the mater-
ial conditions for the later diversification of clothing. Dacron (的确良 diqueliang)
was first developed successfully in Guangdong. Although the production of
Dacron was impeded during most of the Cultural Revolution, by 1973 it had
become one of Guangdong’s top exports.73 Compared to cotton, Dacron is
very strong, highly durable and quick drying, and its local production unques-
tionably opened the door for the personalization and diversification of dress dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution.
Finally, the core reason why people used dress as a means of resistance is a nat-
ural, human wish to pursue their desires and normal lifestyles. Other social phe-
nomena during the Cultural Revolution have demonstrated the resilience of
human nature: the “great criticism” campaign led to the a resurgence of and a
fad for writing traditional poetry;74 manuscript copies of romantic and porno-
graphic fiction rose considerably during the decade;75 and many Shanghainese
privately traded revolutionary propaganda for profit.76 When cadres, educated
youth and workers were sent down to Sunan 苏南 (rural areas of southern
Jiangsu province), they took with them technologies and market information
that benefited the local communities.77

Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the financial support of the Chinese National
Philosophy and Social Science Foundation (Project ID: 15ZDB051). She thanks
Ning Wang, Nicolas Herpin, Deborah S. Davis, Guobin Yang and two anonym-
ous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts. She also thanks Shan
Windscript and Antonia Finnane for their flawless translation. This paper
forms part of a major project by the Chinese National Social Sciences:
“Collection and arrangement of data and documentary research on the sent-
down campaign during the Cultural Revolution.”

Biographical note
Peidong Sun is an associate professor in the department of History at Fudan
University. Her main areas of research focus on comparative and historical soci-
ology, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and social history and institutional
change during the 20th century. She has been published in Open Time
(Guangzhou), Twenty-first Century (Hong Kong), Youth Studies (Beijing), as
well as many other peer-reviewed journals. Her latest books include Fashion

73 “Fangzhi gongye zhi” (Textile industry’s records), Guangzhou shi difang zhi, http://www.gzsdfz.org.cn/
gzsz/06A/fz/frameest.htm. Accessed 6 February 2007.
74 Mei 2007.
75 Liu, Dong 2005.
76 Jin, Dalu 2011, 309.
77 Fei 1992, 24.

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 792 The China Quarterly, 227, September 2016, pp. 773–795

and Politics: Fashion in Guangdong Province during the Cultural Revolution

(People’s Publishing House, 2013) and Who Will Marry My Daughter? The
Parental Matchmaking Corner in the People’s Square of Shanghai (Chinese
Social Sciences Press, 2012, 2013).

摘要: 长期以来, 学界对毛主义的力量和遗产, 尤其是毛主义对文革时期民

众日常着装的影响及其后果少有研究。本文提出被视为同质化和禁欲主义
达到高潮的文革日常着装, 自文革初期起, 就成为多样化、个性化、性别化
和地域化的一个抗争之场。文章表明民众如何透过有意无意的日常着装
“越界”行为表示抗争, 并以此显示动机、阶层、性别和地域层面的差异。
以 65 个文革亲历者的口述史和大量被访者提供的照片为基础, 作者揭示
了 1970 年代后期至 1980 年代以广东为代表的中国着装时尚井喷式爆发
的历史原因; 其次, 通过日常着装反抗的研究, 回应了社会主义国家规训、
日常文化抗争以及毛体制下个人主义和个体抗争的性质等相关理论.
关键词: 着装选择; 着装抗争; 文化大革命; 广东

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