Clothing that “offends the feelings” of the nation could soon be banned in China, according to a recent draft law whose vagueness leaves wide room for interpretation.
The bill stipulates that clothing and speech deemed “harmful to the spirit of the Chinese people” or that “offend the feelings” of the nation will be punishable by fines or even imprisonment.
However, the text does not precisely define the types of clothing that will be prohibited by this legislation.
In China, people wearing clothing or banners transmitting messages deemed politically controversial are already regularly punished for provoking “disputes and unrest.”
The project aims to give authorities more power to crack down on any clothing perceived as contrary to morality.
In early September, a video shared on Chinese social networks showed a man in the southern city of Shenzhen being questioned by police after filming himself wearing a skirt.
Many Internet users approved of the intervention of the police, fearing that this behavior would “make people uncomfortable”.
“It’s offensive to common morality,” wrote a user on Weibo, the Chinese social network.
Several lawyers in the country have publicly opposed the bill, for which the public consultation period runs until September 30.
It would lead to “too vague a punishment standard, which would easily lead to an arbitrary expansion of the scope of administrative sanctions,” Lao Dongyan of Tsinghua University wrote on Weibo.
For similar reasons, Ms. He, a 23-year-old Beijing resident, advocates “establishing carefully considered criteria before putting forward such proposals.”
She believes that it will take “more time” to “determine who has the authority to decide and how to make judgments” on offenses which “are not as clear” as a theft “where true and false are irrefutable.”
“Historical reasons”
But like most people interviewed by AFP in Beijing, Ms. He rather attributes this reform to incidents arising from the wearing of Japanese clothing in historic places or during commemorative days.
In 2021, the state tabloid “Global Times” claimed that a woman had been “severely criticized” after wearing a kimono in public on December 13, the national commemoration day for the victims of war crimes committed by Japan in 1937.
Last year, a woman said she was arrested by police while wearing a kimono in the eastern city of Suzhou.
“Dressing is everyone’s choice and freedom, but there are also particular (circumstances),” said Ms. He, judging that certain behaviors “insulting in front of a statue or on a specific day” are “100% deliberate and must be punished.”
“If a person wears a kimono (…) at the memorial to the victims of the Nanjing massacre by the Japanese invaders, I think it would cause significant psychological harm to the Chinese people,” said Yang Shuo, a 25-year-old programmer. .
Such an act “should be punished”, he criticizes.
“There are historical reasons, and I think the emotions of the local population should be taken into account,” says Mr. Gu, a 35-year-old man.
On the other hand, “in most cases”, the thirty-year-old does not “think it is necessary to initiate proceedings”. Like “for example, if a person goes (in a kimono) simply to a shopping street.”
Moreover, Jeremy Daum, researcher at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale, considers it “almost certain that the formulation (of the project) will be strongly modified” to deal more precisely with “heroes, martyrs, the history of the party , following the numerous comments that this text provoked.