Surrounded by racks of colorful dresses and blazers in China’s manufacturing hub of Guangzhou, plus-size clothing brand owner and influencer Amanda Yao is on a mission to promote body positivity.
She is part of a small but growing number of women in China challenging restrictive beauty standards, including thinness, pale skin and childlike features.
Online, a frequently circulated saying claims that “there are no good women over 50 kilograms,” while recent social media challenges have women squeezing into children’s clothes or showing off the coins they can stack on their collarbones.
Photo: AFP
Yao makes fashionable, high-end clothing for plus-size women, offering a vibrant contrast to the poorly cut offerings normally available in “slimming” dark colors.
“I want my customers to have clothes that express who they are inside, rather than soulless pieces that exist only to make them look thinner,” the 35-year-old said.
When it comes to clothing, most Chinese retailers focus on smaller sizes and “think that larger people don’t need fashion and don’t need beautiful clothes,” Yao said. “But we have work, we have families, we have respectable lives, and we also need some fancy clothes sometimes.”
To promote her online store, Yao posts pictures of her outfits on the Instagram-like Xiaohongshu app, often sporting leggings and tight-fitting workout tops she wears to climb the hills near her office.
“Reject body anxiety,” Yao, who openly talks about weighing 100 kilograms, wrote in one post to her more than 15,000 followers. “So what if I wear a strappy top and have big arms?”
EMBRACING COLOR
Yao began selling plus-size clothing four years ago after returning to China from the UK, where she had worked for several years.
“I found it especially hard to buy clothing here,” she said.
Items ordered online often failed to match sellers’ photos, and Yao grew sick of “very ugly clothes.”
In her Guangzhou office and showroom this month, Yao showed off a Chinese-style pink silk jacket from her brand Yue Design, while modeling a bright green cardigan and skirt set.
“I never post photos of myself wearing black online,” Yao said.
By avoiding the color traditionally recommended for larger women, she has also encouraged some of her customers to embrace brighter, more cheerful designs.
While clothing options for plus-size shoppers remain limited, some Chinese brands have taken steps to be more inclusive in recent years.
Lingerie brand Neiwai and loungewear company An Action A Day have featured larger models in their ads, though most of their items only cater to women up to 70 kilograms.
BODY SCRUTINY
Aside from Yao, other influencers in China have found an audience eager for their posts about self-acceptance and photos of themselves enjoying clothing and food, despite the pressure to diet.
On Xiaohongshu, the hashtag “reject body anxiety” appears in nearly 200,000 posts. But this is still a marked deviation from most body image content on Chinese social media.
One recent popular format involves someone posting a photo of themselves and asking viewers for makeover tips.
These posts often draw extreme scrutiny from commenters, who pick on people for flaws as specific as having a square jaw rather than the “ideal” pointed chin.
With constant exposure to idealized body types, people “start to conflate the meaning of their own worth with what they look like,” said Stephanie Ng, who runs Hong Kong-based mental health organization Body Banter.
That has dangerous consequences, including extreme dieting and eating disorders, Ng said. There is little official data on eating disorders in China, but the prominent Shanghai Mental Health Center reported an increase from eight such patients in 2002 to 3,000 in 2021, according to state broadcaster CGTN.
Even though Yao has built a loyal following, her posts can also attract cruel comments.
“Daring to post an ugly photo showing your ring-shaped torso fat doesn’t equal confidence,” one commenter wrote under one of Yao’s workout posts.
She said that the criticism has only made her more determined.
“I want to help women who are feeling self-hatred to look at themselves in a new way,” she said.
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
Not long into Mistress Dispeller, a quietly jaw-dropping new documentary from director Elizabeth Lo, the film’s eponymous character lays out her thesis for ridding marriages of troublesome extra lovers. “When someone becomes a mistress,” she says, “it’s because they feel they don’t deserve complete love. She’s the one who needs our help the most.” Wang Zhenxi, a mistress dispeller based in north-central China’s Henan province, is one of a growing number of self-styled professionals who earn a living by intervening in people’s marriages — to “dispel” them of intruders. “I was looking for a love story set in China,” says Lo,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
RSS