When East meets West: The politicization of kei pou (qipao) or cheongsam in Hong Kong
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kei pou (qipao in Mandarin) or cheongsam, the oft-interchangeable style of dress has been labelled as the ‘Chinese national dress’ due to western media. However, the perception originally stems from colonial mindset lacking understanding to the diverse Chinese diaspora. This article argues not only is kei pou or cheongsam the representation of Hong Kong’s local culture, but also the symbolism of Hongkonger’s cultural identity. Through object-based research, the article engages with a rare red quilted kei pou purchased in Hong Kong in the 1980s. The dress illustrates the true Oriental beauty with the symbolism of elegance and sophistication of Hong Kong women from an East Asian perspective. The article clarifies the etymological confusion between kei pou and cheongsam through their stylistic taxonomy and historical development and examines the cultural-political connotations of these two styles of dress and their semiotics in constructing the identity of Hongkongers. Consequently, the research proposes the interconnected relationship between the city and the dress, in which exists not only within the contexts of marginalized culture in the Eurocentric world, but also within the authoritarian-ruled China.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".