The Chinese government is at war with tattoos. To prevent the Western fad from taking hold, it's exploiting its thorough control over society, as it often does, even telling parents what to do.
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Yet it will hardly be losing any popularity in doing so, and not only because Chinese people are used to being bossed about. Most are probably highly satisfied with the policy.
The latest move is an edict from the state council, roughly equivalent to the Australian federal cabinet, that bans anyone from offering tattoo services to minors. A minor in China is someone under 18, so the ban is in fact similar to the law in most of Australia.
The tattoo trend in China has been growing but is still at a pretty low level. I guess maybe one in 500 young adults in Beijing has a tattoo.
They tend to be fashionable types, influenced by Western styles, so the fraction would be higher in Shanghai, the city that tries hardest not to be Chinese.
The direction from the state council, keeping children from following these groovers, overrides any law at a lower level, such as a province or town. China has a hierarchy of governments, like Australia, but it's not a federation, in which lower levels have independent authority.
In Australia, a simple ban on something might be enough. But the CCP can and does manipulate society much more widely to achieve its ends.
So government offices that oversee the media (as they do) have been told to reinforce propaganda directed against tattoos on children. There are also orders aimed at advertising and hospitals.
The state council tells families what to do, too. "If children have the notion of getting tattooed, parents and guardians should promptly dissuade them and must not permit them," it says.
We can imagine that the CCP regards tattoos as a sign of rebelliousness - which would be just about its least favourite concept - and, worse, as a sign of rebelliousness inspired by the West.
The Chinese Communist Party began expressing a dislike for tattooing years ago, so it's surprising that the nationwide ban on marking children has taken so long to appear. Many local governments already had such bans; the problem was that not all had got the message.
As for adults, it was probably about 10 years ago when young entertainers, thinking they were the bee's knees, began popping up in Chinese media showing off flashy new tattoos on arms and necks.
In 2018 they got a rude shock when they were told to cover up and realised that their careers would be finished if they didn't get the marks removed.
Soccer players appeared with tattoos around the same time, trying to match big foreign stars at least in fashionability. (Chinese teams hardly match famous foreign teams in performance, to the dismay of their nationalistic fans.)
In 2018 the soccer players were also told to cover up. Some began appearing on fields with bandages, looking rather unfit to play.
Then in December last year the national sports authority banned soccer players from getting new tattoos and advised those who already had any to get rid of them.
Not just influential people in the public eye are targeted. In at least one city in 2020, taxi drivers were told to remove tattoos.
If you think hard enough, as some people do, you can come up with some sneaky political motivation in just about anything the CCP does. But in most domestic policy, it's just trying to govern China effectively.
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So, yes, we can imagine that the CCP regards tattoos as a sign of rebelliousness - which would be just about its least favourite concept - and, worse, as a sign of rebelliousness inspired by the West. In fact, there probably is a bit of that thinking in the CCP's head.
But the great majority of Chinese people will nod with approval at the anti-tattoo campaign. To them, tattoos are simply a traditional sign of bad character - as they used to be in Western countries, though I think we always made an exception for sailors.
This attitude in China has practical importance.
Around 2009, a friend in Beijing, a young man from a poor village in the southwestern province Sichuan, told me he hated his job as a kitchen hand but couldn't get a better-paid one as a waiter because of his tattoos. He'd had them applied to his fingers when he was about 15, he said.
"No boss wants customers to see employees with tattoos," he reminded me. The patrons would see the marks as signs of a low-quality joint and dubious management.
His mother would now wish that the new ban had been in place when he was a child. And so would he.
Reconciliation with China?
Defence Minister Richard Marles met his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, on Sunday. It was the first ministerial-level meeting between Australia and China for more than two years and led some people to think that the Labor government might be able to set things right with our giant neighbour.
Don't be optimistic. There may be a few improvements, such as better trade access (if indeed that counts as desirable), but China's aggressive behaviour will continue, so relations will be back on the downward slope before long.
By accepting the meeting, and raising hopes, China has probably snookered the government on Darwin Port. The Coalition foolishly let a Chinese company buy the commercial facility and couldn't admit its mistake by reversing the sale.
Labor comes to office with no such embarrassment. But does it want to take responsibility for a dive in relations by promptly ejecting the Chinese owner? Probably not.
- Bradley Perrett was based in Beijing as a journalist from 2004 to 2020.
Bradley Perrett
Bradley Perrett is a regular ACM columnist with a focus on Australia's relationship with China, covering defence, strategy, trade, economics and domestic policy. He was based in Beijing as a journalist from 2004 to 2020.
Bradley Perrett is a regular ACM columnist with a focus on Australia's relationship with China, covering defence, strategy, trade, economics and domestic policy. He was based in Beijing as a journalist from 2004 to 2020.
