That news story about China’s leaders wearing identical red ties, dark suits and helmets of jet black hair is absolutely true.
As the Communist party elite assembled for their annual Beijing pow-wow session last week, they were all wearing the same unofficial uniform, as the BBC’s reporters observed, rather unpatriotically.
As they stood, pillar-like, to listen to the national anthem, they posed, in perfect football team rows, evenly spaced apart. If they don’t have the same tailor, they contrive to look almost entirely the same. Indeed, trying to tell them apart is virtually impossible. Of course, dying your hair is nothing new, and everyone remembers sniggering as former US president Ronald Reagan whose hair went from grayish to chestnut and then rich dark brown as he aged. News Corp media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s hair has veered from pinkish to gingerish in recent years too, as his much younger Chinese wife Wendy Deng has clearly been experimenting with his image.
Former US president Bill Clinton proved that grey looks good on men who have hair. In fact if a man has hair, it looks good no matter what colour. And not all Chinese leaders dive into the dye tub – former premier Zhu Rongji last year famously let his go grey and he looked distinguished and distinguishable. Chinese website Weibo commentators had plenty to say about it at the time. "Take a look at the podium for the party congress, it's all people dying their hair and pretending to look young," wrote one commentator.
"Zhu's hair is so natural. If you are old, you are old," said another.
"Officials at a certain rank all have standardised black hair," mooted a third. "If you think carefully, how can everyone look so youthful?"