Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/09/china-university-soccer-game-cancelled-because-players-had-dyed-hair.html
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Wait, but the rules say…
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Let a thousand flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. Then exterminate them.
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I am reminded of the cold war story that there was an Eastern Bloc nation where it was illegal to grow a beard. Unless you got special written permission so that you could play Lenin or Marx in a play.
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“It’s understandable that a country wants its football team to have a positive impact on the general population, but unfortunately the definition of what is positive in China seems very narrow.”
China is already very “conformal” state. They want everyone to be proud Chinese. But as the quote says, what that means seems very narrow.
There is a lot of Nationalism type stuff in Asia. I used to have a Singaporean email pal who would lament that visiting Japan there were less and less people with natural black hair.
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It’s understandable that a country wants its football team to have a positive impact on the general population, but unfortunately the definition of what is positive in China seems very narrow.
That is probably the must succinct commentary I’ve seen on modern Chinese government/society and their push towards an ethnostate.
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I don’t get this. The teams were sanctioned because players’ hair was dyed, yet this made the managers scramble to dye their players’ hair to ensure it was “black enough”? Were the original dye jobs to darken the players’ hair so they appeared sufficiently Chinese? Was the idea to discourage players with brownish or even grey hair from joining teams in the first place?
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No I think the Chinese players dyed their hair to hip looking lighter colours and this pissed off the conservative authorities.
(having just recovered from kidney cancer nothing could make me have anything to do with hair dye)
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The purpose was to dye the hair back to black, so that it would be acceptable.
There have been cases in Japan where schools have required students whose hair is not naturally black to dye it black, because any other colour is banned as unnatural.
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Fuck China. Just Fuck China!
(Not all Chinese, obvs - just the CP and its control freak leaders.)
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In case one does not know this dyed hair in Japanese public school is also usually a no no.
I remember kids being sent home for dying their hair, called chapatsu, which was usually bleaching and dying some shade of light brown.
It’s actually a rule in many public schools, which is why delinquents in anime when they take place in school which is most of them always have dyed hair that looks different than the rest of the characters.
So the same sort of thinking exists in Japan, and it continues in most traditional corporations of a formal nature but not all places. Rules like this though are common. One reason so many young people choose to work as part-time convenience store clerks is because there usually isn’t any kind of image code for that it’s more relaxed.
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IFAB says nothing about dying your hair, and they put ten pages in The Laws of the Game explaining the offside rule.
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This isn’t entirely unfamiliar in the US. It has largely disappeared from the university level (barring a few religious schools), but is still pretty common at the high school level in parts of the country. My district has a rule against unnatural colors, which hasn’t caused any problem with my child’s blue hair, but it was previously strictly enforced.
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Are you sure that you don’t mean Russia when it was ruled by Tsar Peter the Great?
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Agreed, seems to be a lot of people blaming China for this kind of thing when it’s pretty common here.
I can’t say I’ve heard of schools here in the US with rules specifically about hair color but I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I have seen reports of charter schools prohibiting African American students from wearing “natural” hair styles. i.e. no afros, dreads, etc. In fact, I seem to remember one school that had the nerve to cut one young man’s dreads off because they didn’t conform to the schools code and he had been warned.
Then there’s the school picture thing with girls who aren’t allowed to wear sleeveless shirts, or anything with thin straps displaying a lot of (or any) shoulder. There was one school that went so far as to badly photoshop fake shirts over girls with exposed shoulders in their yearbook. Naturally it wasn’t even enforced across the board and of course it tended to be minority girls whose pictures were defaced.
As for sports teams and dumb rules, I wrestled in high school and at age 16 I had the barest bit of downy peach fuzz on my cheeks and chin. I wasn’t even making an attempt to pretend it was going to grow into a beard or mustache. I was simply ignoring it. In order to compete in that day’s wrestling meet I had to have somebody quickly drive me home to shave and back over to the school to have my face inspected by the ref. 
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GirlChild’s school district has a rule against “unnatural” colors, but it seems to be largely unenforced.
While I haven’t seen any kids with “Billie Eilish Powerade green” hair, there are a ton of kids with pink or purple streaks, bleached hair, etc…
Growing up, my school also had a rule against “distracting” colors, but it was the 80’s and punk was big. One kid had a giant bleached mohawk, and his sister changed her hair color every couple of weeks to some other neon and unnatural color. They never got sent home etc… for it.
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Fun fact: You can’t even join the PLA if you have tattoos.
Their cannon fodder must be cut from the finest cloth.
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Of course the next step is for an enterprising youth with a hair color he doesn’t wish to part with: wear a hairpiece/wig for the game.
