Reflections | Why Han Chinese associate tattoos with criminality, and their long history as a punishment and marker of ‘otherness’
- China’s ban on football players having tattoos reflects a long-held attitude among Han Chinese that tattooed people are undesirable
- Tattoos were used as a form a punishment, and those thus punished could not be rehabilitated because they were inked and often joined gangs of criminals
China’s General Administration of Sports issued a new directive late last month that placed an outright ban on tattoos on the nation’s football players.
Despite the recent rising popularity in China of inked skin, the traditional attitude that tattoos mark their bearers as undesirable, or even criminal, elements of society persists in the country, as well as in other East Asian nations. The vast majority of public bathhouses in Japan, for example, still bar people with tattoos from entering their premises.
The antipathy towards tattoos runs deep in traditional Han Chinese culture. The ancient inhabitants of the North China Plain, the cradle of Han Chinese civilisation, considered tattoos to be a marker of ethnic “otherness”.
A phrase that frequently appears in ancient Chinese texts that describes non-Han Chinese peoples who lived in the periphery of the nascent Chinese nation, especially to the east and south, was “shorn (or unfastened) hair and tattooed bodies”.
Just as the ancient Greeks referred to the non-Hellenic peoples in settlements around them as “barbarians”, the ancient Han Chinese also called their immediate neighbours various names that quickly acquired pejorative meanings. That many of these supposedly “uncivilised” neighbours sported tattoos as cultural markers informed Han Chinese prejudice against tattoos from very early on.
