The Chinese Flag, or National Flag of China (中国国旗), is also known as the Five-star Red Flag (Wǔxīng Hóngqí).

The flag of China is a 3:2 ratio flag with a red background and 5 golden stars in the top left-hand corner. 4 of these stars wrap around the largest star in the corner.

The first flag of China as we know it today was hoisted by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) on 1 October 1949, overlooking Beijing's Tiananmen Square. This was at a ceremony announcing the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

Chinese Flag Symbolism

According to the official government interpretation of the flag, the red background symbolizes the Chinese Communist Revolution. The five stars and their relationship represents the unity of Chinese people under the leadership of the CPC.

The orientation of the stars shows that the unity should revolve around a center. In the original description of the flag by Zeng, the larger star symbolizes the CPC, and the four smaller stars that surround the big star symbolize the four social classes of China's New Democracy mentioned in Mao's "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship": the working class, the peasantry, the urban petite bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie.

It is sometimes stated that the five stars of the flag represent the five largest ethnic groups: Han Chinese, Zhuangs, Hui Chinese, Manchus and Uyghurs. This is generally regarded as an erroneous conflation with the "Five Races Under One Union" flag, used 1912–28 by the Beiyang Government of Republic of China, whose different-colored stripes represented the Han Chinese, Hui Chinese, Manchus, Mongols and Tibetans.

Chinese Flag History

The Chinese flag was first hoisted on October 1st 1949 on the occasion of the founding of the PRC, People’s Republic of China.

Before then, the previous flag of China was the “Yellow Dragon Flag”. This Chinese flag was used in the Qing Dynasty. The Qing Dynasty is the last imperial dynasty in China’s history.

It was on July 4th 1949 that he Preparatory Committee of the New Political Consultative Conference (新政治協商會議籌備會, PCNPCC) published the notice to submit designs for the national flag, leading to over 3,000 entries in total.

There was much debate and deliberation over the choice of the current Chinese flag. Mao Zedong preferred a different design.

In the end, the committee settled for a slightly edited version of the final design. The flag of China design was selected on 27th September 1949, and published the new official Chinese flag on 29th September, allowing some time for companies and businesses to copy the design.

Zhao Wenrui, the seamstress for the flag, finished her sewing around midday on the 30th September. Just in time for it to be hoisted the next day.

On October 1st the Chinese flag was hoisted on the flagpole overlooking Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Chinese Flag Inspiration & Creation

The Chinese flag was created by Zeng Liansong. Originally from Zhejiang, he worked as an economist in Shanghai when he heard the annoucement. Feeling patriotic to his country, he wanted to create a flag representing his enthusiasm and patriotism to China.

He spent a lot of time mulling over various designs. In the end, the inspiration for the current flag of China came as Zeng Liansong was looking up to the night sky. He recalled a Chinese proverb; "longing for the stars, longing for the moon," (盼星星盼月亮, pàn xīngxīng pàn yuèliàng), describing yearning. He used this proverb as inspiration for his design. The inspiration for the 4 small stars came from Mao Zedong’s "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," speech. This was a speech defining the Chinese people as consisting of four social classes; 士農工商, shì nóng gōng shāng, "the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie”.

Originally, Zeng had placed the hammer and sickle on the flag also. This was however removed since it was too similar to the Soviet Union Flag.

Zeng received 5 million yuan for his work designing the flag of China.

Chinese Flag Today

Today, the Chinese flag remains widely in use across mainland China. There are various rules for hoisting the Chinese flag, including certain rules for establishments that must hoist the flag and what regulations they must follow for this.

You will see the Chinese flag often in China, and as well as appearing on flagpoles, you may also see smaller versions adorning people’s houses, windows, cars etc.

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    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I love this scathing review of it by Isaac Asimov.

      Some highlights, spoilered for length

      He also turned left wing and became a socialist, fighting with the loyalists in Spain in the 1930s. There he found himself caught up in the sectarian struggles between the various left-wing factions, and since he believed in a gentlemanly English form of socialism, he was inevitably on the losing side. Opposed to him were passionate Spanish anarchists, syndicalists, and communists, who bitterly resented the fact that the necessities of fighting the Franco fascists got in the way of their fighting each other.

      ...

      He wasn't much affected, apparently, by the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, for there was no room within him except for his private war with Stalinist communism. Consequently, when Great Britain was fighting for its life against Nazism, and the Soviet Union fought as an ally in the struggle and contributed rather more than its share in lives lost and in resolute courage, Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters.

      ...

      By the time [1984] came out in 1949, the Cold War was at its height. The book therefore proved popular. It was almost a matter of patriotism in the West to buy it and talk about it, and perhaps even to read parts of it, although it is my opinion that more people bought it and talked about it than read it, for it is a dreadfully dull book - didactic, repetitious, and all but motionless.

      ...

      Orwell lacks the capacity to see (or invent) small changes. His hero finds it difficult in his world of 1984 to get shoelaces or razor blades. So would I in the real world of the 1980s, for so many people use slip-on shoes and electric razors.

      Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he 'fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so 'because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'.

      Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was coming into use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell describes something as being written' with a real nib but being 'scratched' with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.

      ...

      Second - rewrite history. Almost every one of the few individuals we meet in 1984 has, as his job, the rapid rewriting of the past, the readjustment of statistics, the overhauling of newspapers - as though anyone is going to take the trouble to pay attention to the past anyway.

      This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done.

      As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.

      ...

      Here is prescience. At the time Orwell was writing 1984, the Chinese communists had not yet won control of the country and many (in the United States, in particular) were doing their best to see that the anti-Communist, Chiang Kai-shek, retained control. Once the communists won, it became part of the accepted credo of the West that the Chinese would be under thorough Soviet control and that China and the Soviet Union would form a monolithic communist power.

      Orwell not only foresaw the communist victory (he saw that victory everywhere, in fact) but also foresaw that Russia and China would not form a monolithic bloc but would be deadly enemies.

      There, his own experience as a Leftist sectarian may have helped him. He had no Rightist superstitions concerning Leftists as unified and indistinguishable villains. He knew they would fight each other as fiercely over the most trifling points of doctrine as would the most pious of Christians.

    • emizeko [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      because the establishment pushes it hard

      The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow, genuine socialists managed to sneak his work past a censor that banishes the likes of Karl Marx and Malcolm X.

      The less complicated reading is the correct one: it’s an anti-communist book that the establishment pushes, and the right adores and cites constantly, because it is effective anti-communist propaganda.

      Let’s part from a very basic fact: The CIA loves Orwell.

      Between 1952 and 1957, from three sites in West Germany, a CIA operation codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched millions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — whose airforces were ordered to shoot the balloons down. [1]

      The movie adaptation of Animal Farm was the UK’s first animated feature film, and it was entirely funded by the CIA. This fact was kept secret for 20 years, and only revealed in 1974, to no cultural impact. [2]

      Orwell enthusiasts insist that he would be horrified by this turn of events, that he was trying to preserve a genuine and humane socialism from the clutches of “Stalinism”. They insist Orwell was against all empires, not just the one he lived in. However, his life and his work rather undermine this interpretation.

      from https://redsails.org/on-orwell/