Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

As a single-party state, Communist China had a precedent in Nationalist China. As a vestimentary regime the party state of the People’s Republic of China shared important features with its predecessor, most noticeably the cadre suit. The shared human resources of the two party states included the Red Group tailors, masters of Western tailoring in the former Treaty Ports, especially in Shanghai. The story of the Zhongshan suit takes various forms but most involve the Red Group. Chapter 1 relates their story, important in Chinese history not only because of this hagiographical element but also because of the manifest significance of the group as agents in the transformation of tailoring techniques. In a historical context characterized by often sharp oppositions between West and East, China and Japan, and Nationalists and Communists, the history of the Red Group shows the links between the Western suit and the Zhongshan suit, tailoring techniques in Japan and China, and dress practices in the Nationalist and Communist eras respectively.