China's Gen Z Is Rewriting the Aesthetics of Chinese Identity

Something has shifted in how young Chinese people relate to their own culture. The generation that came of age in the 2010s, raised on the internet and the ascent of China to global economic prominence, is expressing a form of cultural confidence that their parents' generation — shaped by the humiliations of the Cultural Revolution and the inferiority complex of the "opening up" era — often struggled to feel. The phenomenon has a name: guochao, national wave.

The Fashion Revolution

Li Ning — the sportswear brand named after the Olympic gymnast — became the emblem of the guochao moment when it showed a collection at New York Fashion Week in 2018 that made no apologies for its Chineseness. The clothes referenced Red Army aesthetics, traditional calligraphy, and the color palette of Chinese theater costumes. They were immediately popular with exactly the young Chinese consumers who, a decade earlier, had saved up for Nike Air Jordans as status symbols. The reversal in aspiration has been remarkable to watch.

Domestic brands like Anta, HeyTea, and Florasis (a cosmetics brand rooted in traditional Chinese botanical medicine) have built billion-dollar businesses by speaking to this new cultural confidence. Their marketing does not apologize for its Chineseness or translate it for Western audiences. It asserts it — and young Chinese consumers respond with a loyalty that international brands have found increasingly difficult to compete with.

The Complexity Within

Guochao is not a simple nationalist phenomenon, though it has nationalist dimensions. It is also a creative movement — young Chinese artists, musicians, and designers drawing on the full depth of Chinese aesthetic tradition and finding in it resources for contemporary expression that feel genuinely new. The musicians fusing erhu with electronic production, the fashion designers combining Song Dynasty garment construction with streetwear silhouettes, the illustrators creating manga-influenced work saturated with Tang Dynasty imagery — these are artists not performing nationalism but discovering, perhaps for the first time, what it might mean to be fully Chinese and fully contemporary at once.