The Chinese 33Suits’. The Chinese call them the ‘Zhong-shan-fu’ or ‘ Sun
Yat-sen suits’, since Sun, the father of Modern China, first
advocated wearing simple traditional peasant designs as
a classless national uniform. This led to the Chinese being
called ‘Blue Ants’ by many Westerners, seen as faceless
masses working together for the common good. Some
scholars saw this as ‘natural’, declaring China’s rapid
adoption of Communism to be a direct outgrowth of the
stratified social obligations and denial of individual passions
inherent in the traditional bureaucratic and Confucian ideals
of imperial China.
Of course, the truth was more complex even in Mao’s day.
The authors have spoken with farmers who kept tiny patches
of illicit tobacco growing right through the Mao years for
extra income and some sense of independence. We’ve met
children raised in the Mao years by aunts and grandparents,
effectively ‘hostages’ held at home to ensure Communist
Party loyalty while their diplomat parents, selected in part for
language skills, worked abroad (such children, unsurprisingly,
often grew up with mixed feelings about the Party). We’ve
also met some ‘Young Princes’—children and grandchildren
of top Party leaders of the Mao era—who saw first-hand the
corrupt cynicism that pervaded much of the top ranks and
reacted variously by growing up as neo-idealist reformers,