From “Thermal Pants” to “Guochao”: Generational Aesthetics and the Reinvention of Cultural Identity in Contemporary China: How Post-90s and Post-00s Chinese Youth Redefine Chineseness through Hanfu and Neo-Chinese Design

Abstract

This article examines how Chinese post-90s and post-00s generations reconstruct cultural identity through aesthetic consumption, focusing on the rise of “Guochao” (national trend) and Hanfu movement. Contrasting with the previous generation’s anxiety over symbols of “backwardness” such as thermal pants, contemporary youth actively embrace and reinvent traditional Chinese aesthetics in fashion, design, and digital spaces. Drawing on digital ethnography of Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Taobao, the study analyzes how young consumers negotiate between cultural authenticity and global trends, producing what we term “aesthetic citizenship”—a form of belonging enacted through everyday stylistic choices. The findings challenge both Orientalist critiques of self-exoticization and simplified narratives of state-sponsored cultural nationalism. Instead, Guochao emerges as a generational project of creative appropriation, where Chineseness is not inherited but performed, debated, and constantly remade in digital publics.