Eyes on Chinese female models’ faces: stereotypes, aesthetics, self-Orientalism, and the moral discourse of the CPC

2.1 Discrimination in modern history

The slanty-eyed look is characterized by narrow and high oblique eyes, not always but often with small eyeballs. It has two origins. The first is the notion of “piggish-looking eyes,” which both highlights the small size of Chinese eyes and alludes to the discriminatory thought that the Chinese are as stupid as pigs. This expression widely spread in Caucasian media and works in the second half of the nineteenth century in the colonial period in China. One of the earliest documents is The Middle Kingdom, written in 1848. Samuel Wells Williams, the author and an American missionary, writes in the first version of his book: “The Chinese were on the whole an uninteresting, grotesque, and uncivilized ‘pig-eyed’ people, whom one run no risk in laughing at” (Roberts 1991: 142). Another origin is related to Down syndrome. It is named after British doctor John Langdon Down, who first described the disease in 1862 and used the term “mongoloid” because of the facial similarities with the Mongolian race, including upward-slanting eyes, wide ocular distance, and flat bridge of the nose. Since then, the description “slanty eyes” and the gesture of “narrowing eyes with fingers” have a strong racist meaning, an implication of intellectual disability to East Asians.

The discriminatory image of the Chinese was reinforced in the late nineteenth century with the “Yellow Peril” discourse. It could be separated into two levels. Firstly, China was seen as a military threat, tracing back to the fear of the Mongols in the Middle Ages. One of the representative products is the allegorical painting commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1895, which called for an Occidental alliance against the Chinese and Japanese threat to Christian civilization, making up the colonial invasion of China and the struggle for hegemony against Japan into self-defense against the Chinese army and hostility toward Eastern races and civilizations (Sun 2023). From this perspective, the Yellow Peril is a part of imperialist discourse to maintain the justifiability of colonization. Secondly, at that time, Chinese immigrants were considered warriors of the “Middle Kingdom,” a virus of loathsome diseases, devils with opium and prostitutes, and thieves of local employment opportunities and higher wages (Lyman 2000). From this perspective, the concept of the Yellow Peril was a part of racist discourse among the masses, constructing and reinforcing the negative collective imagination of the Chinese.

Inspired by the perception of the Yellow Peril and shocked by the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, English author Sax Rohmer wrote a series of novels in which the fictitious character Dr. Fu Manchu became a classical symbol of the Yellow Peril and the competent but evil Chinese (Zhou 2003). The novels were published in installments for more than fifty years and were adapted into various media, such as films, TV series, radio programs, and comics. The cover of the novel The Trail of Fu Manchu in 1934 provides a perfect representation of the discriminatory Chinese face, with nearly invisible eyeballs, slit, and high-slanting eye shape, and oblique mouth, combining both the small “piggish-looking eyes” and Down syndrome’s traits.

In general, between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the Western representation of slanty eyes was a derogatory depiction of the Chinese. It included small piggish eye, high-slanting eyes, and pathological slanting eyes, adopted by the imperialist and racist discourse. Served as visual proof of the collective imagination of the “uncivilized” or “evil” Chinese, the slanty-eyed look was frequently present in Western books, newspapers, and painting manuals (Li 2016; Li and Zhao 2015).

2.2 Stereotypes in contemporary society

The representation of the Chinese eyes gradually changed after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. The Opening and Reform Policy in 1978 is a milestone of modern China. Since then, China has had a more friendly and open attitude toward the West, and more Chinese persons and companies are trying to establish cooperation with the Westerners. A symbolic successful case is the Disney animation movie Mulan in 1998. In the film, Mulan’s eyes are neither small nor narrow as slanty eyes. The big eyes with highlights are the window of her strong self-will and courage, which correspond with the philosophical reflection of Mencius.

The pathological representation of Chinese eyes disappeared, while the feature of the palpebral slant is reinforced, as in Mulan’s face. In cartoons, eyes are enlarged in the character’s face to promote cuteness and show spirit, while in the representation of a real person, Chinese eyes are not so big, in particular in comparison with Western eyes.

The visuality of race marks one’s identity, which “permeates our being in the world, our being-with-others, and our consciousness of our self as a being-for-others” (Alcoff 2005: 194), especially in Western immigrant societies. Accordingly, the representation of race features in the face is highly significant. In China, however, race is not a visual feature to be emphasized. On the one side, race “is not salient for the numeric majority, it does not make consumers distinct in the social environment” (Xu and Chen 2016). On the other side, the inclusiveness of the Chinese culture and collectivism accentuates the same identity of the nationality instead of placing emphasis on the difference among 56 ethnic groups.

Following the logic of racial difference, there is no denying that the slight degree of the palpebral slant is a common racial feature of the Chinese and that the openness of the Asian eyes is generally smaller than that of Caucasians. However, should the narrowness and the slant be emphasized together to represent the Han ethnic group, the majority of the population in China? There is no recognized standard for the classification of Chinese (Han ethnic group’s) eye shape. In some Chinese studies on facial recognition technology (Li et al. 2016; Sun and Rong 2017; Shang and Bu 2019) and female facial makeup recommendation systems (Huang 2020; Li 2018), researchers selected four (or five) distinct features of eyes: length, width, inclination, ovality/curvature of eyelids (and ocular distance). They classified, in general, three typical groups of eye shape: long, thin eyes, oval/almond eyes, and round/big eyes (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Illustration of the three typical groups of Chinese female eyes and the amount of data (Li 2018: 10).

The representation of typical almond eyes and round eyes is nearly invisible in the West. The depiction of slanting eyes described in this paper is widespread. The homogenization of the Chinese female model’s look with (natural or made-up) slanting eyes and single-fold eyelid in Western fashion magazines and model TV shows has already been criticized in China (Li 2020: 33–34). In this respect, identifiable slanting eyes became a stereotype instead of a single type of Chinese eyes, reducing the diversity of Chinese eyes, simplifying and ossifying itself as the exclusive standard Chinese eye shape in the Western context, in the sense of Hall’s distinction between typing and stereotyping (Hall 1997: 258). To emphasize the “Chinese” palpebral slant, the makeup sometimes exaggerates the representation of normal slight slanting eyes, which could be classified as long, thin eyes, almond eyes, or round eyes, into high-slanting, long, thin eyes, which in Chinese aesthetics belongs to the offensive representation of slanty eyes and has a negative meaning. It is evidence of Orientalism: the representation and common perception of the Chinese facial image and female eyes are produced by the powerful Western imaginary of the Oriental in the multimedia world in discourses of naturalization and the generalization of stereotypical long, thin slanting eyes without concern for other classic types of Chinese eyes nor the possible racist implications caused by the slight but sensitive deformation of stereotypical eyes.

4.1 Self-Orientalized Chen’s photo

At the figurative level, Chen’s 2021 photo is a reproduction of the discriminatory image of Chinese women in the nineteenth century. The long fingernail guards suggest that the model represents an imperial consort in the Qing dynasty. However, the model’s greasy and tightly combed-up hair, the artificial flower hairpins on her head and the sparse bangs are highly related to the look introduced by British lawyer Henry Charles Sirr in 1849:

A Chinaman’s beau ideal of perfection in woman, consists […] in […] high cheek bones, small piggish-looking eyes, with pencilled eyebrows meeting over the nose, low brow, oblong ears, coarse black hair, which is invariably anointed with stinking pork fat, until it stands on end; then the hair must be drawn up from the face, to the top of the head, where it is dressed in a high knot, in which is stuck perpendicularly silver, or jade stone pins, and artificial flowers—the size of a small cabbage. (Sirr 1849: 61–62)

The model’s fingers are slightly larger than the fingernail guards, making the thick knuckles and fleshy fingers more obese, linking to the image of a pig. In Chinese costume dramas set in the Qing dynasty, such as Empresses in the Palace (2011), the fingernail guards are perfectly fitted with the fingers of the actresses, making their hands look more slender and more elegant.

In particular, the makeup on the model’s face reinforces the racist features. The heavy eye shadow elongates and upturns the corner of the model’s original phoenix eyes, creating an unnatural and exaggerated slanting look reminiscent of slanty eyes. In terms of skin color, the model’s face is made up to be bronze-colored and so non-uniform that the edges of the face and lips show the model’s original complexion. The Chinese have preferred a fair complexion for two thousand years. In Dazhao (大招), a poem created between 329 B.C. and 296 B.C. in the poetry collection Chu Ci (楚辞), the author describes beauties who “put white powder on the face and draw black eyebrows” (Zhou 1990: 1172). The “white powder and black eyebrows” (粉黛) is so important that it can be used to describe the action of putting on makeup in Chinese (施粉黛) and became the metonymy of female beauty in the narrative poem Chang Hen Ge (长恨歌), one of the most representative literary works of the Tang dynasty. Besides the color, the uneven skin tone makes the model’s face appear dirty and rough with freckles uncovered by the dark foundation. Should an elegant imperial consort present herself with such a sense of “naturality”? In contrast to the delicate fingernail guards and flower hairpins, the makeup is a brutalization of the Chinese female face with an implication of shoddiness.

At the plastic level, the main dark colors in the picture tend to have strongly held associations of “sad” and “stale” across cultures (Madden et al. 2000), creating a gloomy and oppressive atmosphere. The depressive feeling exists in the chromatic dimension as well. The model’s neck is covered by the collar, which forms a straight line downward with the shoulder, donating a sense of falling. With these elements, the traditional Chinese bilateral symmetry of the picture tends to have a negative meaning, corresponding to the Western stereotypical imagination: Eastern societies and cultures are stable, immobile, humanity-constrained, antiquated, and backward.

However, this does not fit an image of the time that saw the Chinese as a people that needed “to be saved”; it is evil and threatening. The sharp angles of the fingernail guards and the outer corner of the eyes, and the broken lines of the scalp create a sense of aggression. The model’s gaze is in the center of her oval face and of the inverted triangle constructed by the hairline and collar. For the Chinese, the black eyeballs without highlights and the uninterpretable gaze of their compatriot suggest a sense of barely concealed malice, associated with “the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient” (Said 1979: 237), like the Yellow Peril in the nineteenth century and the China threat theory today.

Chen’s photo was originally shot in 2012 for Dior rather than the Chinese public, satisfying the client’s imagination of the Chinese. As the title Restrained Pride (骄傲的矜持) demonstrates, the figure is interpreted as full of secrets and exotic, without concerning the distorted traditional symbols of imperial consort and offensive stereotypical facial representation. This is not the only case in which Chinese producers employ self-Orientalization to meet Western aesthetics (bronze-colored complexion, natural freckles, slanting eyes, etc.) and Orientalist stereotypies (image of Chinese beauty and culture in the nineteenth century). In the context of globalization, self-Orientalism is considered a negotiable strategy in advertising (Cai et al. 2018; Dirlik 1996; Feighery 2012; Kobayashi et al. 2019). By using Orientalist discourse, native creators both play and convert the existent role of the “Other” to gain recognition, position attractiveness, and identification in the Western-dominated system. Even if in Chen’s photo the representation of the model basically follows Western stereotypes, the photographer has slightly modified the “uglification” of the female Chinese image with real phoenix eyes, rather than the slanty eyes of history. The criticism of the picture from Chinese netizens and state media also shows the dialectical relations between confirming, supplementing, and opposing Orientalist discourse.

4.2 Moral denunciation from the general public

The controversy on the representation of Chinese eyes instigated by Chen’s photo lasted for a month. The perception of slanting eyes went through two stages. The first was the denial phase. After Chen’s photo was posted on Xiaohongbook on 12 November 2021, netizens intuitively thought that the artwork was “unbeautiful” and “not a representation of my eyes but an image of squinting eyes,” criticizing the photographer for appealing to Western stereotypes. As the criticism grew, netizens began to debate what exactly “squinting eyes” were and became confused. Some believed that the Chinese themselves were oversensitive, using ancient representations of phoenix eyes or “not so beautiful” Chinese faces to prove that the image of the squinting eyes is traditional and not offensive; while others introduced more works that are considered self-Orientated to support the criticism.

Among these works, a series of posters of the Chinese nut brand Three Squirrels released on Weibo on 10 October 2019 requires particular attention. First, the posters are aimed at the domestic market, but deviate from the popular aesthetic and bear a greater resemblance to the Orientalized face with slanting eyes, wide ocular distance, and thick lips (Figure 5). Secondly, these posters did not cause much controversy when they were posted but were rediscovered and reinterpreted by netizens. On 26 December 2021, the hashtag “Three Squirrels Model” became one of the hottest trending topics on Weibo, a social media platform similar to Twitter, with over 15,000 tweets and 170 million views (JRJ 2021). Thirdly, the model in the photo, Cai Niangniang (菜嬢嬢), stirred up more controversy among netizens when she defended her face on the same day in the evening, saying “Don’t I deserve to be Chinese despite my small eyes?”

Figure 5:

Face of a criticized poster of Cai Niangniang (Three Squirrels 2019).

In the studies of controversial Orientalist advertisements, researchers frequently attribute the causes to national sentiments, emphasizing the influence of racism, stereotypes, and nationalistic sentiments (Fam and Waller 2003; Wang 2020b). Cai’s case provides new questions for the study: How does the Chinese model, gazed at in the public opinion storm, explain herself? What is the dynamic relationship between the model’s face and the image of the Chinese face perceived by the public?

To answer this question, I utilize the face concept in Chinese collective culture. Hu (1944), the first Chinese scholar to analyze the meaning of the Chinese face, separates it into two concepts: lian (moral face) and mianzi (social face). Hwang continues the study in the Confucian social context and summarizes:

In daily usage, mianzi represents the kind of social reputation that is highly valued by Chinese. It is the kind of status that has been deliberately accumulated by a person through effort and achievement and with pride during the course of life. […] Lian represents public trust in the individual’s morality. Once lost, an individual cannot function as usual in the group. […] The relationship between lian and mian was just like the difference between personality and title as emphasized by Confucianism. (Hwang and Han 2010)

In the Three Squirrels case, Cai’s response was to protect her own face, which is negatively valued as ugly and stereotypical in posters in the view of the public. “I didn’t intentionally create any insulting image […]. My eyes are like this [representation in posters], even smaller than this in daily life. Does that mean that you should not be a model if your eyes are like this? You insult China on the day you were born?” Cai emphasizes the uniqueness and naturalness of her own face and thinks that her face is being criticized by netizens for their extreme sensitivity as a result of the nationalistic discourse around “insulting China” and the aesthetic hegemony of big eyes among the public. Her response has sense from an individual point of view but neglects the role of the face in the collective society.

Different from Westerners, whose faces emphasizes the subjectivity of an individual, the Chinese face focuses on the communal aspect (Mao 1994), tightly linked with relationships, both in interpersonal relationships and in the power structures and international political status (Hwang 2013). In this context, Cai’s face is not only a personal face to show her singularity or her functional enacted role as a model, but a related face with her community, a part of the face of “greater self,” namely the national face. From this perspective, the public should pay more attention to promoting “authentic” representations of the compatriot model’s face. If the selected face is stereotypical in conventional sense, even though the face of the model is natural without heavy application of modifying makeup, the model loses her face and the Chinese, as a whole, lose their face.

For the general public, the use of offensive facial representation in Western-made advertisements undermines the social face (mianzi) of the Chinese. To protect their social image (as a Chinese consumers) and national image (as the whole of Chinese society), the “practice of using social capital [public opinion and boycott] to establish, protect, or gain symbolic capital [including mianzi] has been routinely used by Chinese citizens” (Huang and Janssens 2019). In the self-Orientalist advertisements, the Chinese lose neither mianzi nor lian, due to the immorality of the compatriot creators’ self-Orientalized actions. Lian is more basic and important than mianzi in terms of losing face, with the significance of morality and personality (Cheng 1986; Hwang 2006). The fact that creators and models lose their lian in self-Orientalist works evokes a strong sense of shame of losing lian for the whole of the Chinese general public.

To save lian, the nationalist criticism is reinforced. In the Three Squirrels case, the netizens researched and revalued Cai’s performance and words in the past on social media, interpreting her action of lifting her eyes out of the original context of dancing movements and of comic facial expressions as the strong immorality of the self-Orientalism. They widely posted and reposted the screenshots of her lifting eyes in her video without approval, harassed and abused her with private messages, and violated her basic rights to privacy and reputation as an individual in the name of collective justice. The official Chinese media did not intervene directly in this violence. Two days later, however, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League (CCCYL) published an article that emphasizes that self-Orientalization is a product of Orientalism, drawing the tension among the people (between the masses and the model) into the tension between China and the West in Orientalist discourse.

4.3 Criticism and proposal from the CPC

The CPC positions itself as the leader of the nation and the Chinese culture, as Xi Jinping reported at the nineteenth CPC National Congress in 2017: “Since its founding, the Communist Party of China has actively guided and promoted China’s advanced culture while keeping China’s fine traditional culture alive and strong” (Xi 2017: 40). The issue of self-Orientalization requires the CPC to be active in a huge controversy, and to guide the public opinion without going in the wrong direction (ideology) or having worse impacts (reality).

As mentioned above, Chen’s photo became the trigger for a discussion about squinting eyes that lasted for over a month. Past works were unearthed and reassessed, such as the Three Squirrels posters; and new controversy emerged for the new animated film I Am What I Am, in which the protagonists’ faces reflect features that are similar to Down syndrome, such as high-slanting eyes and wide ocular distance. Netizens did not reach a consensus in the long-running debates. Their criticism was more like a subconscious defensive counterattack, a kind of sensitivity toward the portrayal of their national identity. It is directly related to national sentiments as a rebellious response to the powerful Orientalist discourse and to the painful history of semicolonization. It stems from a bottom-up collective morality of face, where their own face is connected with the national face, resulting in a nationalist blowing-off of steam.

The commentary published by the state media under the CPC is a conscious counterattack that targets the West’s cultural hegemony. On 26 December 2021, the CCCYL posted an article on Weixin and Weibo, the principal social media platforms in China, which criticizes the racism and colonialism of Orientalism and self-Orientalism. The author explains the offensiveness of squinting eyes in history and points out that “Behind the right to define ‘what is beauty’, it is the dispute over the power of discourse on the international stage” (CCCYL 2021). By admitting the existence of a powerful Western-centric order and opposing self-Orientalization, the CCCYL also makes a clear division of “we” and “they,” “China” and “the West,” to emphasize the traditional Chinese aesthetics both in the domestic community (to save lian at the moral level) and in the outer group (to save mianzi at the international level).

But there are two problems with this anti-Orientalist discourse. First, by taking China as a whole, it represses the heterogeneous voices within the nation. The author takes Cai’s video screenshots of lifting eyes as proof of her self-Orientalization, ignoring the objective existence of the model’s own small, thin eyes and the value of her non-mainstream aesthetic in fashion pluralism. Second, when confirming the authenticity of Chinese aesthetics by denying Orientalism, the distinction is exclusive and confrontational. It erases the existence of ancient Chinese representations of slanting eyes, ignores the positive influence of modern Western culture on Chinese aesthetics, and neglects the commonality between Chinese and Western aesthetics. Cross-cultural researchers have found different perceptions of the mouth, the cheekbones, the nose, and the complexion (Zhan et al. 2020), but it is hard to confirm a distinct different preference for eye shape between China and the West. Frith demonstrates that “the forms of representation, particularly of women, can take on a globalized or transnational look” (Frith et al. 2005). It is necessary to be aware of cultural difference, while at the same time it cannot be simplified as the boundary of the aesthetic dichotomy of “China” and the “West.” Otherwise, it becomes an Orientalist point of view, as Said defines that “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (Said 1979: 11–12).

These shortcomings are compensated for in the CPC’s article with another discourse that emphasizes aesthetic pluralism. This perspective goes beyond the conflicting framework of “Orientalism” versus “anti-Orientalism” and attempts to answer the question “what are beautiful representations we can perceive” (plural, descriptive, flexible) rather than “what is authentic aesthetics on eye representation” (single, definitive, fixed). In fact, in the article, the author states: “Oriental beauty can have thousands of forms, but it can never pander to the imagination of the ‘Orientalists’” (CCCYL 2021). The emphasis is on the subjectivity of the creator and the sense of not deliberately pandering to Orientalism, with the implication of moral criticism and exhortation.

The same moral concern of the CPC is also demonstrated in the case of ZARA. In February 2021, some Chinese netizens criticized ZARA’s beauty campaign photos for supposedly insulting the Chinese due to the natural freckles on the model Li Jingwen’s face. Two days after the publication of the photos, Zhongqing Comment (中青评论) (the news commentary department of China Youth Daily, one of the most important media outlets of the CPC) defended ZARA with the article ZARA is accused of ‘insulting China’, but this concept should not be abused, in which the author points out:

Because they [the critics] subjectively think that the Chinese model’s representation is “not beautiful enough,” they conclude that it is “uglifying” the Chinese people, and this has led to controversy about “insulting China.” […] The sensitivity to this advertisement is essentially the sensitivity to reality. With the flood of beautified photos with the excessive smoothing effect of the skin on the Internet, it is becoming more and more difficult for people to accept faces without digital modification, and to appreciate real but imperfect beauty. Some people can see Li Jingwen’s unique beauty, while others interpret it as a “disgrace to China.” This contrast begs a reflection our aesthetic system. (Yang 2019, my translation)

The article does not mention the possibility that the critics’ sensitivity toward the Chinese model’s face may be caused by their self-gazed position, in which they expect the Chinese image to be always positive and appreciated in a Westerner’s view. It is more like a moral discourse, intended to guide people toward the proper appreciation of facial beauty.

The CPC’s moral concern can be traced back to the Confucian political concern with ethics and virtue. Confucius says: “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they are led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good” (Analects 2.3). Morality has a gentler and more desirable effect than law in maintaining social order. Fanned by collectivist culture and nationalist sentiment, the critique of self-Orientalization can develop into perverse violence, such as the online abuse suffered by Cai. The moral discourse of the CPC instead, becomes a milder critique and guide. On the one hand, it asks creators to raise awareness of and vigilance toward Orientalism and self-Orientalization, emphasizing the rejuvenation of traditional aesthetics and aesthetic pluralism rather than stereotyping that appeals to the West. On the other hand, by participating in the face representation controversy which is not self-Orientalization but simply different from the mainstream aesthetics (ZARA’s case), the CPC advocates self-reflection on mainstream aesthetics. Both the CCCYL and Zhongqing Comment advocate aesthetic diversity and inclusion rather than finding a certain standard or certain characteristics of authenticity to oppose or modify the Orientalist model, showing a possibility of self-expression beyond the Orientalist discourse. Except for squinting eyes, which are tightly related to racism and Orientalism in history, diverse styles of beauty in both traditional and contemporary mass aesthetics impacted by the West are considered acceptable in the Chinese beauty encyclopedia.