Chinese eyes learn to behold beauty

Miss Spain Maria Teresa Martin walks between traditional Chinese performers during a welcome ceremony for Miss World contestants at a Beijing hotel yesterday. The 110 Miss World contestants are touring China before the final of the contest is held at Sanya, on south China's Hainan Island on Dec. 6. PHOTO: AP

In China's Communist heyday, when Chairman Mao (毛澤東) was at the helm, the only models anyone dared to celebrate were model factory workers and farmers.

But Maoism has since been supplanted by an unswerving faith in market economics, and drab Mao suits by haute couture, and the country is now nuts for supermodels and beauty queens.

Next China hosts the 2003 Miss World competition, putting the world's most populous country officially on the beauty pageant map.

The 110 beauties vying for the Miss World tiara flew in to Beijing on Tuesday for a few days of photo ops on the Great Wall and in the Forbidden City ahead of the Dec. 6 contest in Sanya, a resort on the semi-tropical island of Hainan.

"Miss World in China. Why not?" a Chinese commentator under the pseudonym "100 percent Cantonese" said on an online message board.

"I am going to beautiful tropical Hainan island for that event, I hope to meet one of those queens on the beach and invite her to a Cantonese dinner," the person wrote.

Until beauty pageants were banned in China as heretical expressions of bourgeois decadence.

During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, women who used make-up could be branded counter-revolutionaries. Now, body image is a preoccupation of choice among urban youth.

Fashion-show have popped up in malls and in front of department stores nationwide. Billboards advertising beauty products and name-brand fashions are everywhere.

Calling year "the first pageant year in China," the Web site of the Communist Party's sober-minded mouthpiece, the People's Daily, said the Miss International competition would be held in China next year.

"The craze in pageants is, on one hand, due to people's nature to pursue beauty, and social and economic development makes it possible for this pursuit and enriches its contents," the Web site said. "On the other hand, under the market economy, pageants become a medium, and the beauty economy is prospering."

It said 75 percent of online respondents to a questionnaire by popular Web sites Sina.com and Sohu.com supported China's participation in international pageants. Twenty-seven percent saw them as "a demand for the development of the market economy."

The People's Daily Web site, www.people.com.cn, even said pageants were part of China's history, but stopped short of saying it invented them -- like gunpowder, compasses and noodles.

"Beauty contests among common Chinese people originated from the prostitution circle. There was `flower board' evaluating prostitutes dating back to the Xining period (1068-1077) of North Song Dynasty (960-1127)," it said.

But after the Communists took power in 1949, pageants were banned and China did not enter the Miss World competition, which started two years later, until 2001.

Even with official sanction, the transition to a beauty-contest-friendly China has not been all smooth.

Last year, police in southern China raided an auditorium during the Miss China contest saying the organizers did not have a permit.

The pageant was quietly allowed to continue and the winner, Zhuo Ling, went on to become second runner-up at the Miss Universe finals in Puerto Rico.