From October 27 to October 31, Shanghai welcomed Halloween with unprecedented festivities that saw thousands of revelers donning creative, colorful costumes that defied convention in parades through the streets.
During the city’s first post-pandemic Halloween, Shanghai’s parade showcased scary-good originality. Partygoers did not stop with traditional costumes like zombies, ghosts, witches or skeletons. Instead, most designed costumes full of dark humor and creativity that borrowed heavily from China’s traditional and pop culture. They dressed as local celebrities, online influencers, characters from popular period dramas and even popular memes.
Some costumes were dripping with satire. For example, a young man dressed as an exhausted computer programmer with a ghastly pale face and sunken eyes. Taped to his disheveled shirt was a piece of paper that read “Party B,” a reference to the employment contract he signed that doomed him to the exhausting “996” work culture (12-hour, 6-day work week) prevalent in Chinese tech companies.
Shanghai’s Halloween festivities gained viral attention online, where millions of young people celebrated the air of freedom, openness and tolerance the carnival embodied.
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