From conflict to peace: Hanfu performance and “Embodied Connection” in the Chinese Youth’s British Museum initiative

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Chinese students engaged in a broad conversation on the British Museum’s tweet, “Join us in celebrating Korean Lunar New Year with magical performances,” which resulted in both online and real protests. In-depth interviews with eleven attendees of the event were done for this study with the objective to illustrate how Chinese youth organizations create communication strategies in an unfriendly and foreign setting. According to the research, the actors used Western social media as a “medium of resistance” early in the conflict, but their demands were not realized by the system’s embedded unequal discursive order. As a result, they wore Hanfu to perform peaceful cultural performances in the museum space, making up for the “uselessness” of the digital space by using their bodies as “mediums of performance.” Local Chinese social media functions as an “organizing medium,” combining local Chinese social networks with information from around the country and abroad. This brings disparate actors together in the museum setting, and the body in Hanfu becomes a “compensatory” medium, connecting the shared Hanfu experience and upending the Western-dominated media order.