“The human body in traditional China was not seen as having its own intrinsic physical glory,” says China scholar Mark Elvin, author of Changing Stories in the Chinese World. Beauty was not dependent on sexual characteristics and attributes, he says, but on artifice and ornamentation—a painted face, silk brocade, the jade bracelet that dangles from the wrist—or alteration such as the painful and crippling binding of feet.

Contacts with the West changed all that. The presence of the pale-skinned, blue-eyed gwai lo, “foreign devil,” forced a new kind of self-awareness on the East. Take the beautiful cheongsam, a body-hugging piece worn by Chinese women. Developed in cosmopolitan Shanghai around 1900, it originated from its opposite, the qipao—a baggy and loose-fitting dress once meant to deemphasize and conceal the wearer’s figure, that was transformed in the final years of China’s last dynasty to reveal curves, waist, bosom, and a lot more skin.

Under Mao, the human form was depicted as strong, vital, and synonymous with the goals of the state, as in this propaganda poster.

Along with the colonial-era concept of the body as an object of admiration came a more insidious metaphor perpetuated by Westerners: the “sick man of East Asia.” It was reinforced by caricatures of the frail, opium-addicted Chinese man with a long pigtail. Chinese defenselessness carved a deep wound in the collective psyche. Not surprisingly, the Boxer Rebellion, a peasant-based uprising in 1899–1901 against foreign influence, had at its heart the belief that the body can achieve invincibility. The rebels were practitioners of martial arts, which they believed could help turn their bodies into armor, impervious to bullets. That the rebellion failed and the bullets did pierce their flesh did not extinguish this collective longing for inviolability. The theme of Chinese martial arts as the antidote to Western conquerors’ firepower continues to inform and inspire many martial arts films, novels, and comic books.

Under Mao, the body was once more inducted to represent the nation. In propaganda posters that have become collectors’ items, workers are depicted as strong and square-jawed; athletes are lithe and agile. Sports became synonymous with modernity. A strong body was reflective of national strength and was seen as necessary for unity. The self was in service to a larger cause, and everyone moved together wearing Mao jackets—a sea of blue and gray. The body, subdued by ideology, was not yet free.

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