Flag of China

How to read it

China’s National Flag Law, passed in 1990 and amended in 2009 and 2020, says the national flag is the Five-star Red Flag (五星红旗) and that it is made to the construction sheet published by the presidium of the first plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. That sheet fixes a red field 3 units long to 2 high, with five yellow five-pointed stars in the upper corner by the pole: one large star whose circumscribed circle is three tenths of the flag’s height, and four small ones of one tenth, in an arc to its right. The conference adopted the flag on 27 September 1949, and it was raised for the first time in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on 1 October 1949. The flag law itself gives the colours and stars no meaning.

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How the stars are placed

The construction sheet, as Hong Kong’s Education Bureau reproduces it, works on the upper quarter of the flag by the pole, divided into 15 equal parts along its length and 10 down its height. The large star’s centre is 5 parts from the pole and 5 from the top, and the star is drawn in a circle with a radius of 3 parts, one point straight up. The four small stars have a radius of 1 part. Their centres are 10 parts from the pole and 2 from the top, then 12 and 4, 12 and 7, and 10 and 9, and each small star has one point aimed at the centre of the large star. The stars on the back of the flag mirror those on the front, and the sleeve for the pole is white.

What the stars stand for

The Education Bureau says the four small stars each point at the centre of the large one to show unity around a centre. Xinhua wrote in 2022 that the four small stars around the large one stand for hundreds of millions of people turning towards the Communist Party. The magazine The World of Chinese says that in Zeng Liansong’s design the main star was the Communist Party and the four others the classes of the Chinese people, which it lists as workers, farmers, intellectuals and business people. The same magazine calls it a popular myth that the five stars are China’s five largest ethnic groups.

Who designed it

Zeng Liansong, an office worker in Shanghai, answered the public call for designs in July 1949. Xinhua says his entry was picked from 2,992 designs in 1,920 submissions, and that the hammer and sickle he had drawn inside the large star were taken out. The Education Bureau gives a different count: 3,012 designs received, of which the first selection committee put 38 before the conference.

Telling it from Vietnam’s flag

Vietnam’s flag is also red with yellow stars, but it has a single gold five-pointed star in the middle of the field, as its constitution puts it. China’s has five stars, all in the top corner by the pole.

What the flag law says about flying it

The flag law has it flown every day at Tiananmen Square and Xinhua Gate in Beijing, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and at airports, ports, railway stations and other border crossings. A flag-raising ceremony is held every day in Tiananmen Square, and schools hold one once a week outside the holidays. At half-mast the flag is first raised to the top, then lowered until the gap between the top of the flag and the top of the pole is a third of the pole’s length. The flag and its design may not be used in trademarks or commercial advertising. The construction sheet lists five standard sizes, from 288 × 192 cm (about 9 ft 5 in × 6 ft 4 in) down to 96 × 64 cm (about 3 ft 2 in × 2 ft 1 in).