The modern Chinese tunic suit is a style of male attire known in China as the Zhongshan suit (simplified Chinese: 中山装; traditional Chinese: 中山裝; pinyin: Zhōngshān zhuāng) (after Sun Yat-Sen), and known in the West as the Mao suit (after Mao Zedong). Sun Zhongshan (better known as Sun Yat-sen) introduced the style shortly after the founding of the Republic of China as a form of national dress although with a distinctly political and later governmental implication.

After the end of the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the suit became widely worn by males and government leaders as a symbol of proletarian unity and an Eastern counterpart to the Western business suit. The name "Mao suit" comes from Chinese leader Mao Zedong's affinity for wearing them in public, thus tying the garment closely to him and Chinese communism in general in the Western imagination. Although they fell into disuse among the general public in the 1990s due to increasing Western influences, they are commonly worn by Chinese leaders during important state ceremonies and functions.

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung  listen (help·info), and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976), was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution. He was the architect and founding father of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949, and held authoritarian control over the nation until his death in 1976. His theoretical contribution to Marxism–Leninism, along with his military strategies and brand of policies, are collectively known as Maoism.

Mao rose to power by commanding the Long March, forming a Second United Front with Kuomintang (KMT) during the Second Sino-Japanese War to repel a Japanese invasion, and leading the Communist Party of China (CPC) to victory against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) in the Chinese Civil War. After solidifying the reunification of China through his Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, Mao enacted sweeping land reform, by using violence and terror to overthrow the feudal landlords before seizing their large estates and dividing the land into people's communes. During the years when Mao was China’s 'Great Helmsman', a range of positive changes came to China. These included promoting the status of women, improving popular literacy, doubling the school population, providing universal housing, abolishing unemployment and inflation, increasing health care access, and dramatically raising life expectancy. In addition, China's population almost doubled during the period of Mao's leadership (from around 550 to over 900 million). As a result, Mao is still officially held in high regard by many in China as a great political strategist, military mastermind, and savior of the nation. Maoists further promote his role as a theorist, statesman, poet, and visionary, while anti-revisionists continue to defend most of his policies.

Suit or suits may refer to:

Zhu Wei (Chinese: 朱偉︱朱伟), Chinese artist. One of China’s most visible contemporary practitioners of the post-Tiananmen period, Zhu is known for his subtly quizzical critique of politics and society in a rapidly evolving China. Faithful to that country’s quintessentially classical artistic medium, Chinese painting, the Beijing-born-and-based Zhu is principally a painter. In recent years, however, the artist has broadened his formal reach to include print-making as well as figurative sculpture. His China China series of monumental Mao-jacket-clad Chinese cadres, begun in 2000, has achieved iconic status. In most of his works, his vision often seems anguished and alienated, personal and political at the same time.

Zhu Wei was born in Beijing in 1966. As a teenager, Zhu entered the military. His soldiering days ended when he was admitted to the People's Liberation Army Art Academy, finishing in 1989. After a few years of painting propaganda art for the motherland, his unit was demobilized in 1992. And the following year he went to study at the Beijing Academy of Film. Despite his educational background and association with the artistic values of state sanctioned art, Zhu has an incredible knowledge of Chinese tradition and spends enormous effort in perfecting his ink washes (also called Chinese painting), a technique popularized by Taoist artists in fourth and fifth centuries. His works are widely collected in Europe, the US, Asia and often feature in international auctions.

Tseng Kwong Chi ((chin. 曾廣智, * 1950 in Hong Kong; † 10 March 1990 in New York) was a photographer who was active in the East Village art scene in the 1980's. His most famous body of work is his self-portrait series, East Meets West, also called the "Expeditionary Series." In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his "Mao suit" and sunglasses, and photographed himself situated, often emotionlessly, in front of iconic tourist sites of the West including Notre Dame de Paris and the World Trade Center.

Tseng also took thousands of photographs of New York graffiti artist Keith Haring throughout the 1980's working on murals, installations and the subway. In 1984, his photographs were shown with Haring's work at the opening of the Semaphore Gallery's East Village location in a show titled "Art in Transit".

Tseng died of AIDS and was survived by his companion Robert Haynes, according to his New York Times obituary. Robert Haynes died on December 22, 1998.