A year after Shanghai\u2019s boisterous Halloween celebrations made global headlines, revelers dressed as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and comic book superheroes were escorted away by police as authorities appeared to crack down on the festivities. <\/p>\n
Videos on social media showed a heavy police presence in three busy Shanghai bar and restaurant areas, where partygoers typically celebrate the annual tradition more closely associated with the United States, raising concerns about further narrowing of personal freedoms in China. <\/p>\n
Crowd control fences had been erected to restrict pedestrian traffic in some streets, according to images on social media, and a park near another popular nightlife area where costumed partygoers had congregated on Saturday was also shuttered the next day. <\/p>\n
The tight controls in China\u2019s most cosmopolitan city follow last year\u2019s at times raucous celebrations, when young people came out in force to celebrate the first Halloween since the lifting of China\u2019s stringent Covid-19 restrictions. Many <\/strong>donned costumes offering social critique \u2013 a rare phenomenon in a country where dissent is not tolerated in any form. <\/p>\n It was not clear whether they were detained or merely escorted from the immediate area. The circumstances leading up to these interactions with law enforcement were also not clear. <\/strong>As of Tuesday, some videos were still circulating China\u2019s heavily censored internet, while others seemed to have been taken down. <\/p>\n While some officially sanctioned Halloween celebrations, such as those at Shanghai Disney Resort and the Happy Valley amusement park, went ahead as scheduled, the apparent tamp-down on some public <\/strong>Halloween gatherings this year caught the attention of Chinese social media users, with one user on Weibo, China\u2019s equivalent of X, noting that her social media feed felt particularly empty. <\/p>\n Like other places in Asia, such as Japan and South Korea, many young people in China treat Halloween as an occasion to dress up and meet their friends in venues that put on themed events. <\/p>\n But Chinese state media have warned <\/strong>in recent years <\/strong>against citizens being \u201coverly passionate\u201d about Western festivals \u2013 part of a broader, nationalistic backlash against perceived foreign influence. <\/p>\n Last <\/strong>weekend\u2019s celebrations appeared to end early for one young man who donned a blond wig and a bandage on his right ear to imitate former US President Donald Trump, a now-deleted post on Chinese social media platform Douyin showed. Trump wore the bandage after a bullet skimmed his ear during an assassination attempt <\/strong>in July. <\/strong> <\/p>\n Superheroes Spiderman and Batman, as well as a man who donned <\/strong>a yellow robe with a beaded necklace in the image of the Buddha, were all escorted away by police, according to online videos. <\/p>\n In China, crowd control measures are not unusual in public, especially during holidays, but some online users openly wondered what it would mean for future Halloweens. <\/p>\n \u201c(I guess) there will never be any Halloween celebration in Shanghai as innovative as the one in 2023. It will slowly lose its edginess and become harmonized,\u201d a <\/strong>user wrote. <\/p>\n Celebrations last year in Shanghai were marked by huge crowds and revelers using the holiday to take tongue-in-cheek swipes at China\u2019s strict Covid lockdowns and lackluster economy. <\/p>\n Some dressed as university graduates who had failed to land a job, a reference to China\u2019s sluggish economy and high youth unemployment rates. Others rocked up in hazmat suits in a sarcastic swipe at China\u2019s stringent Covid control measures, which saw Shanghai locked down for roughly two months and sparked rare protests. <\/p>\n That rare public critique in a country of heavy censorship both in online debate, media and entertainment was largely unimpeded by police last year, who practiced crowd control but did not appear to be proactively stopping people in costumes, based on media reports. <\/p>\n The Shanghai municipal government even praised last year\u2019s Halloween celebration as \u201ca sign of cultural tolerance.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThe recent Halloween celebration in Shanghai, with its unique blend of western traditions and Chinese creativity, offered a glimpse into the evolving cultural landscape of a vibrant city,\u201d it said in a statement last year. <\/p>\n Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said last year\u2019s celebration happened during \u201ca vacuum\u201d when the Shanghai authorities were working to return to normal less than a year after the lifting of Covid lockdowns. <\/p>\n \u201cThis year authorities are much more prepared, and they do not agree with these kinds of activities,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A year after Shanghai\u2019s boisterous Halloween celebrations made global headlines, revelers dressed as Republican presidential…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9538,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Backlash against Western influence<\/h2>\n
Party like it\u2019s 2023?<\/h2>\n