China is Culturally Confident Enough to Handle Halloween
By Qinglang Wu, November 6, 2023
There were Batman, Cowboys, and TV celebrities on the streets of Shanghai.
But there were also rare public expressions of the LGBTQ+ communities, historical re-enactments of the A4 Movement and COVID-19 Prevention and Control in the past three years, as well as political satire in Winnie the Pooh Bear or Emperor costumes.
I was shocked when I saw those photos. Right before that, I was feeling powerless as my post on Weibo was being censored for including the words “Winnie the Pooh”, even though I was trying to use the word to describe my friend.
This animated character has always been a sensitive issue for Chinese authorities because of the appearance resemblance between Xi Jinping, China's current chairman, and Winnie the Pooh.
But today, in Shanghai's first major Halloween celebration in years, countless young people took to the streets in costumes, enjoying the festive atmosphere and expressing their views on society.
Those photos and videos set me on fire. This year seems to be the most festive year for Halloween in Shanghai in the last ten years, and today also seems to be the most festive day in Shanghai.
I lived in China for 18 years, and my impression of Halloween is that of teachers dressed up as ghosts with big bags full of candy to give out to the students in schools, or of a group of adults who lead their children in the neighborhood knocking on doors and asking for candy.
It was never a big festival in China, as far as I remember.
On social media, I used to see young people in Western countries parading around on Halloween dressed as Mona Lisa, Superheroes, zombies and all the classic symbols of Western culture.
Seemingly influenced by the cosplay trend in recent years, this year's Halloween in Shanghai, China, was best characterized by cosplay. And in my opinion, many of the cosplays were very creative.
Someone plays Lu Xun, a famous modern Chinese writer who abandoned medicine for literature, and in his works mostly calls on the Chinese people of the early 20th century to rid themselves of ignorance and to fight against feudalism and superstition.
At the Halloween parade, people were wearing Lu Xun's iconic tunic suit, holding signs that read, “Studying medicine won't save China,” and chanting one of his most famous words, “May our youth get rid of this indifference and keep away that self-abandonment. Make your voice heard and your action seen, like a firefly shining itself…such fireflies shall be the only brightness if a brighter future doesn’t come.”
Among the videos circulating on the Internet, I was most impressed by a “healthcare worker” wearing a white hazmat suit and putting a huge cotton swab into a dinosaur’s mouth.
I bet there’s no one in China right now who doesn't recognize these workers in hazmat suits, after all, these are the people that almost everyone has been seeing every day for the past three years.
What a ridiculous thing to do test on dinosaurs! People passed by and laughed. But it's such a ridiculous and laugh-out-loud cosplay that it's full of great irony.
Some people say that this is an invasion of Western culture if you celebrate Halloween and satirize our pandemic prevention policy, and the authorities must take care of it. And in fact, the police did take away some of them.
My comment is that this is like a vivid modern absurd theatre. Last year today, a group of health workers went door-to-door to do COVID test for the public and took away those who didn't listen to them. And today, this batch of “workers” was taken away by the police. You never know who’s going to stay at the top of the power hierarchy!
The police take away those they find vulgar and transgressive, but what is the standard of being transgressive?
If you're going to take away some people, you should state at the very beginning what we can and cannot dress up as, and make a clear explanation that will convince the public.
Hu Xijin, a guest commentator for the Global Times, said, “Shanghai Halloween is relatively active and has become a symbol of tolerance in this modern city. I don't think public opinion needs to put pressure on this compliance or try to constrain it while spectating it.”
This is not a cultural invasion at all, it's at best a Chinese adaptation of Western culture. Don't blame the people who are brave enough to reflect on social phenomena but reflect on the causes of these social realities.
A country with cultural confidence would not use nationalism to cover up an inferiority complex about its own culture, just as this group of young people with a strong desire to express themselves used this Western holiday to express themselves confidently. They used costumes to show that they haven't forgotten the suffering of the three years of the pandemic, to show their support for the LGBTQ+ community, and to show their dissatisfaction with censorship.
So, at this moment, I can proudly say that China, or at least its youth, is culturally confident enough to handle Halloween, and the spirit of rebellion against the social experience that they embody is something we should embrace and be inspired by.
