Chinese tunic suit

The modern Chinese tunic suit is a style of male attire traditionally known in China as the Zhongshan suit (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Zhōngshān zhuāng) (after Sun Yat-sen, also called Sun Zhongshan), and later as the Mao suit (after Mao Zedong). Sun Yat-sen introduced the style shortly after the founding of the Republic of China as a form of national dress although with a distinctly political and later governmental implication.

After the end of the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, such suits came to be worn widely by males and government leaders as a symbol of proletarian unity and an Eastern counterpart to the Western business suit. The name "Mao suit" comes from Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong's fondness for wearing them in public, so that the garment became closely associated with him and with Chinese communism in general in the Western imagination. Although they fell into disuse among the general public in the 1990s due to increasing Western influences, they are still commonly worn by Chinese leaders during important state ceremonies and functions.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Mao suit became fashionable among Western European, Australian, and New Zealander socialists and intellectuals. It was sometimes worn over a turtleneck.

When the Republic was founded in 1912, the style of dress worn in China was based on Manchu dress (qipao and changshan), which had been imposed by the Qing Dynasty as a form of social control. The majority-Han Chinese revolutionaries who overthrew the Qing were fueled by failure of the Qing to defend China and a lack of scientific advancement compared to the West. Even before the founding of the Republic, older forms of Chinese dress were becoming unpopular among the elite and led to the development of Chinese dress which combined the changshan and the Western hat to form a new dress. The Zhongshan suit is a similar development which combined Western and Eastern fashions.

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