A couple year back I used to be a far more obliging person and that’s how I ended up teaching a ‘group class’ to a couple of kids whose age and English levels weren’t remotely similar. I found out about the class four minutes before it began and so I was a little unprepared. We were going strong playing hangman except the mother of one of the children kept giving her son the answers which meant my careful time budgeting was being binged away and I had no idea what to do for the next 30 minutes. There were strings of flags hanging from the ceilings so I asked the kids to see how many they could name. My geography is even worse than the normal American so I didn’t actually know if they were right nor not. Luckily the mother was more interested in participating in the class than in evaluating my decidedly sub par performance.

I asked them what the stars on the Chinese flag meant – the flag of the People’s Republic of China that is – and they explained the big star was the mainland and the surrounding stars were Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and one other territory I can’t remember now. The mother nodded her head in approval and all the kids seemed to agree. Having now looked it up on the internet and asked several coworkers, it seems this is not the case at all.

The "Five-Starred Red Flag” (五星红旗 | wǔ xīng hóng qí) first waved in the breeze on October 1, 1949, after Mao Zedong himself hoisted it up the flagpole to flutter over Tiananmen Square. The flag flapped above the crowds who had come to witness official birth of the People’s Republic of China.

The flag was designed by Zeng Liansong and received final approval on September 27, 1949, after Liansong – a man who was both an artist and an economist – removed yellow stripes at the bottom meant to symbolize the Yangtze, Yellow, and Pearl rivers; the committee felt they made it appear the nation was being torn apart.

Wisdom of my pre-pubescent students and one of their mothers notwithstanding, the large star actually stands for the Communist Party of China, or the leaders of the PRC, depending on how you choose to look at it. During Mao’s reign the four stars were meant to symbolize the four classes Mao saw as the pillars of society. In other words the stars represent the workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie (basically the smaller business people and the more successful business people). I’m not sure if that’s from top to bottom or what.

After Mao, the stars began to stand for the farmers, workers, teachers, and soldiers. Now many people see them as the workers, farmers, intellectuals, and businesspeople.

However you choose to interpret the star issue, the bottom line is that China has some of the coolest flags around, including several whose designs were way ahead of their time – one could even say revolutionary.

Zeng Liansong’s five-starred flag is a masterful piece of design conveying the country’s new ideology with confidence and force, but it’s not the only work of art to have waved in the Chinese breeze.

The Qing empire flag (below) was definitely cool, after all it sports a dragon trying to eat the sun, but the really innovative designs didn’t start until the Qing Dynasty ended. From the beginning of the 20th century onward Chinese flags were masterpieces of bold minimal design that swam in the face of the centuries of ornate gilded lavishness that had come before. They also reflect a concern for ease of manufacture and print reproduction – crucial tools in propagating one’s message to the maximum number of people with the minimum amount of resources. Think how long it would take to make the Qing Dynasty flag compared to the others on this list.

The three incredibly contemporary looking flags below look like they are some sort of text message code that the kids understand, like ‘lol’ or ^__^ or some kind of command-line interface, but in fact the first two are the War flag and the Naval ensign. The slashes and underscore are not some kind of emoticon, in fact they read – in slick minimal Chinese numerals – 8.1, or August 1st, the date the People’s Liberation Army was established. The blue lines cleverly suggesting waves should tell you which one goes on the new aircraft carriers China building. The third flag, the sky blue on red Joseph Albers-like colorstudy represents the PLA Air Force.

Looking at the next two mad me think that if Jack White ever leaves his wife/sister, their band the White Stripes, and his love for the Dutch 1930s design movement De Stijl, he could start a new band with a new slightly expanded color scheme called either The Manchukuos or The Fengtian Clique after the two flags below.

The first flag flew over Manchukuo, a short-lived (especially by Chinese standards) puppet-state in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. The region saw the birth of the Qing Dynasty in 1644 and witnessed its last gasps in 1945 when the Manchukuo government – founded by former Qing officials but backed and administered by Imperial Japan – was abolished at the end of World War II.

Click here for the Fengtian Clique, the Three Mas of the Northwest, more innovative design, and colorful history.
 

Related Links
The Fabric of History – A Century of Chinese Flags and the Stories Behind Them (Part 2)
This Week in Chinese History
The Pursuit of Liberty, Justice, and Patriotic Kitchenware

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