Thank goodness the woke police weren’t around when my Chinese-born wife and I traveled to her homeland in 2014 for our Chinese wedding — else I’d have been found guilty of “cultural appropriation” for dressing up in Chinese-style costumes for our wedding photos.

Just ask Rihanna. The wokesters are ripping her for donning traditional Asian garb for a recent Harper’s Bazaar China shoot. The pics show the singer and fashion icon in flowing silk gowns, with little fans in her hair, her lips painted red at the center and lotuses affixed to her long nails. An updated Madame Butterfly, if you will.

“I know we all love her, but why isn’t this cultural appropriation?” asked one Twitter user. “So it’s mandatory for anyone to dress in native clothing when they pose for Japanese magazines?” asked another. “Love Rihanna, but we can’t accept everything she does cause it’s her.” Fellow singer Elizabeth Le Fey accused Rihanna of “playing with orientalism.”

The culture site The Blast, meanwhile, wondered: “Did Rihanna just pull a Kimono Kardashian?” That referred to a similar flap a few weeks ago, when Kim Kardashian had her knuckles rapped for naming her body-wear line “Kimono.”

The fact that Harper’s Bazaar China is run by, well, Chinese people was lost on Rihanna’s critics. Indeed, the shoot’s photographer was Chen Man, among the best-known in China.

Chinese people, as anyone with passing familiarity knows, appreciate it when foreigners adopt their ways: It was at my Chinese relatives’ behest that I dressed up as an ersatz Chinese emperor, a Chiang Kai-shek-era nationalist and so forth (“kitsch” isn’t a dirty word in the Middle Kingdom). Believe me, I wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t cajole me, including with the searing shots of Moutai that fueled the whole trip.

But even if the team and the platform hadn’t been Chinese, who cares? Cultural exchange and the intermingling of forms, ideas and styles — these things are at the heart of the creative enterprise. Cultural appropriation has been going for thousands of years, and not just with the West appropriating from “the East” (whatever that means).

As David Frum noted in The Atlantic last year, “every culture appropriates.” The notion of regularly shifting clothing styles is a European invention, one Chinese and other cultures have, well, appropriated over centuries.

My own Persian ancestors borrowed architectural styles shamelessly and prodigiously from the civilizations that surrounded them, and they, in turn, left a Persian touch on the art and architecture of the peoples who conquered them and the ones whom they conquered in turn. How do modern wokesters propose to police and litigate these interactions? Or how are they going to untangle the mix of European and African influences that came together to create jazz music?

They can’t, and the impulse to do so is ahistorical and philistine.

Yes, we should condemn grotesque kinds of outright cultural theft, often tinged with mockery. Think of minstrelsy, for example, or when a large music publisher uses a tribal ditty with clear ownership without paying for it.

But the modern PC movement goes far beyond such concerns. Increasingly, it insists that artists can’t even touch characters or experiences with which they don’t have an immediate personal connection.

Last year, for example, the woke crowd forced Scarlett Johansson to step down after she was cast in a male-to-female transgender role in the movie “Rub & Tug.”

Now she’s facing a furious backlash for expressing regret over losing that part. “You know, as an actor I should be allowed to play any person,” she said in an interview. Heresy, cried the cultural commissars. But Johansson is exactly right: Every creative act involves stepping into someone else’s shoes.

Shakespeare’s father wasn’t murdered, yet the Bard wrote profoundly and powerfully about Hamlet’s quest to avenge the king of Denmark. Tolstoy wasn’t Napoleon, a young society debutante or a wolf, but he convincingly described the interior worlds of all three characters in “War and Peace.” Tom Hanks never contracted HIV, yet he movingly played a gay man battling the disease in “Philadelphia.”

Taken to its logical conclusion, the cultural-appropriation obsession would bar all such art. The only acceptable art would be autobiographical — the dull lives of PC scolds, as told by PC scolds.

Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor and author of “From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith.”