Flag of China

What does the flag of China look like?

China’s national flag is a red rectangle with five yellow five-pointed stars in the upper corner beside the pole. One large star sits to the left of four smaller stars arranged in an arc. Its width is one and a half times its height, giving a width-to-height ratio of 3:2.

This is the flag of the People’s Republic of China, commonly called the Five-star Red Flag, or Wǔxīng Hóngqí (五星红旗). The name identifies the visible design: five stars on red. There are no horizontal stripes, no text, and no national coat of arms on the ordinary national flag.

Its formal adoption was on September 27, 1949. The founding ceremony at Tiananmen Square followed on October 1, 1949. Keeping those dates separate prevents a common confusion between the decision choosing the flag and the ceremony that made it internationally recognizable.

The edge attached to the pole is the hoist; the free edge is the fly. In the usual front-view illustration, the hoist is on the left. Most of the flag remains plain red, so the star cluster has a distinctive position and clear visual emphasis.

Construction and exact proportions

Use a rectangle 30 units wide and 20 units high. The official method divides the upper hoist quarter into a grid 15 units wide and 10 units high. Extending those same units over the entire rectangle produces the 30-by-20 drawing below. No sleeve or pole is included in the colored field’s dimensions.

Set the origin at the upper-left corner of the red field. Measure x to the right and y downward. A circumradius is the distance from a star’s center to one of its outer tips; it is not the distance to an inward notch.

For a regular five-pointed star, alternate outer and inner vertices at 36-degree intervals around the center. The inner radius is the outer radius multiplied by (3 − √5) ÷ 2, approximately 0.381966. This is a geometric consequence of the regular star, not a separate color or symbolism rule.

The four inward-pointing directions follow from the coordinates. From the highest small center, the vector toward the large center is (−5, 3); the remaining vectors are (−7, 1), (−7, −2), and (−5, −4). These different vectors explain why the small stars must be rotated separately. A complete drawing can therefore be reconstructed from the table without tracing a photograph.

Because area scales with the square of a linear dimension, the large star has nine times the area of one small star when both use the same regular shape. This is useful for understanding their visual hierarchy, but it is a calculated property—not an official symbolic meaning for the number nine.

Who designed the flag of China?

Zeng Liansong designed the proposal that became the Five-star Red Flag. He was a Shanghai-based worker from Rui’an in Zhejiang, with an interest in drawing rather than a career as a professional flag designer. A committee considered and revised his submission before the national flag was formally adopted in September 1949.

Zeng’s original proposal placed a hammer-and-sickle motif inside the large star. The adopted design removed that internal device, leaving the large star plain. This is an important distinction when comparing an archival proposal with the finished national flag: a proposed element is not necessarily part of the flag that was adopted.

His role also differs from those of the delegates who selected the design, the officials who approved it, and the people who sewed the first ceremonial flags. Describing Mao Zedong as the flag’s designer conflates the founding ceremony with the design competition. Describing one early seamstress or workshop as the designer would make a similar mistake.

Accounts of the competition do not always count submissions in the same way. Some count designs, others packages or entries. The well-documented facts most useful for this flag’s story are the large public response, the booklet of 38 selected designs, and the identification of Zeng’s proposal as No. 32. Those details explain the process without turning a disputed total into false precision.

Display, handling, and ceremony

The National Flag Law gives the flag a position of prominence and sets rules for raising, lowering, condition, and use. The 2020 amendments took effect in 2021. Separate provisions govern diplomatic, military, maritime, and regional settings, so guidance for one setting should not automatically be applied to every other setting.

The framework describes morning raising and evening lowering for the institutional and occasion-based displays covered by the relevant provisions. It also allows for severe weather. A dramatic photograph taken at night is not, by itself, enough to determine which institutional rule or special arrangement applied.

Hong Kong’s Protocol Division gives practical handling guidance: inspect flags regularly, dry them before storage, fold them neatly, and explain the raising and lowering procedure to the staff responsible. That advice is useful for caring for a physical flag; its legal setting is the Hong Kong ordinances and administrative arrangements.

For international displays, the national law refers to the Foreign Ministry’s rules or international practice. This qualification matters: a domestic rule giving the national flag prominence is not a reason to place another country’s flag in a deliberately subordinate position at an international ceremony.

Half-mast and national mourning

The national law provides for half-staff display after the deaths of specified state leaders and other designated persons, and in connection with certain national memorial occasions, serious disasters, public-health emergencies, or other events causing especially serious casualties. The actual dates and places depend on the applicable official decision; they are not a standing instruction to lower the flag on every anniversary.

On a vertical pole, first raise the flag to the peak. Then lower it until the distance from the peak to the top edge of the flag equals one-third of the pole’s length. Before taking it down at the end, raise it to the peak again and then lower it completely.

Flag-draping of remains, coffins, or urns is distinct from flying a flag at half-staff. The law provides for designated eligible persons and requires careful handling and recovery of the flag after the ceremony. It should not be described as a general entitlement for every funeral.

A monochrome graphic, a black border added to an online image, and a flag lowered on a pole are not the same ceremonial act. The mourning diagram here preserves the national flag and explains its position on the staff. It does not create a new black or modified version of the national design.