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Coronavirus pandemic
ChinaPolitics

How Communist Party membership and state-sector jobs became fashionable choices for young Chinese

  • Advice on dressing like a government official or party cadre attracts millions of clicks
  • Retrenchments due to the pandemic have seen jobseekers focus on promise of stability

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Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen
Jane Cai

Beijing university student Kathy Yao takes occasional breaks from summer holiday preparations for the national civil service exams to check for social media posts on the latest fashion trend in mainland China – cadre style.

There are hundreds of videos posted on Xiaohongshu – Little Red Book – the mainland’s leading fashion social media platform, showing how to dress like a government official or Communist Party cadre. On Zhihu, a question and answer website and mobile application, users posted over 700 answers last month to the question “what is cadre-style dress”, and they attracted nearly 7 million views.
When I see pictures of young men in plain white shirts, blue windbreakers or black coats, they look neat and reliable
Kathy Yao, university student
“The style is in vogue. My classmates and I became fans this spring when we were bored to death in lockdown,” Yao, a 21-year-old Chinese literature major, said. They had been confined to their dormitory amid an outbreak of the Omicron variant of Covid-19.
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“I used to like oversized hip-hop clothes. But when I see pictures of young men in plain white shirts, blue windbreakers or black coats, they look neat and reliable. Merely viewing the pictures offers a sense of security during a time of turbulence.”

Black or dark blue zippered windbreakers have become the second skin of Chinese officials. Top leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao made a habit of donning the featureless attire to show they were men of the people, and President Xi Jinping also sports the look frequently – during farm inspections in villages, meetings with cadres and other occasions. His underlings have also adopted it to showcase their conformity.
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Previously regarded as functional rather than fashionable, cadre-style dress gained in popularity in recent years after the party persuaded young pop, film and television stars to publicly embrace communist values. However, it was Covid-19 that made it a fashion trend as people focused on stability amid fears about the disease and anxiety about China’s hardline pandemic control measures.

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