Tattoos are a Mark of the Uncivilized

Americans have freedom, and China is under the dictatorial rule of Communists. Here is the latest example.

The UK BBC TV reports:

Footballers who play for China's national team have been banned from getting tattoos - and advised to remove ones they have - under a new directive. ...

In Chinese culture a stigma has been attached to tattoos - in the past they were used to brand criminals and the tattoo still has links to organised crime groups in east Asia. Tattoos among ethnic groups were often seen as a mark of the uncivilised.

They are disapproved of by China's ruling Communist Party, but have become increasingly popular among young Chinese. ...

Last December, a women's university football match in China had to be called off after players were told they were not allowed to have dyed hair.

The match organisers, the National Youth Campus Football League, said in a statement at the time: "Athletes at all stages shall not have tattoos, dye their hair, wear weird hairstyles, or wear any accessories, otherwise they will be ineligible for the competition."

Update: A Chinese woman reports in the NY Times:

China is facing serious challenges on multiple fronts: Great power competition with the United States. Trade disputes. The future of Taiwan. But that doesn’t mean it’s too preoccupied to escalate a battle of another sort on the home front.

The Chinese government, you see, has been fighting what state news outlets have called a “masculinity crisis” for the past few years, with one top official warning that “effeminate” men in popular culture were corrupting “a generation.” The Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece decreed that young men need to have “toughness and strength” and censors have blurred out male celebrities’ earrings in television and online appearances. ...

These women’s embrace of a more fluid form of masculinity is not a phenomenon the party should dismiss. Well-educated and financially independent, these women are bucking gender norms themselves by turning away from matrimony and motherhood and are proving to be resistant to the party’s push to boost marriages and births to offset the effects of an aging population.

So the NYT wants Chinese men to be gender fluid, and Chinese women to turn away from marriage and motherhood.

The government’s idea of the ideal male reads like an outdated description of 1950s gender norms: Muscular, reliable, career-oriented providers. The “masculine spirit” requires physical and mental fitness as well as “strong will power,” the Ministry of Education said earlier this year.

Yeah, they hate manly men.