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From the August 2001 issue
of World Press Review (VOL. 48, No. 8)
Jin Xing: Dancing Golden Star
Tekla Szymanski
Associate Editor
A high-ranking Chinese military officer transforms
himself into a transsexual modern-dance icon: It sounds like
the story line of a sassy soap opera. But this is the life
of Jin Xing, 33, a former soldier who after a sex change has
become China’s most admired dancer. Jin is China’s
“most famous transsexual,” whose life achievements
“border on the revolutionary [and] overturned traditions
long upheld in China,” wrote Sylvie Levey in London’s
Daily Mirror. “High-ranking representatives of
the Communist Party, dressed to the nines, pay a fortune to
watch her perform from their seats in the front row.”
But Jin believes her transsexuality is not the source of her
success. Born in Shanghai, Jin Xing (“Golden Star”
in Mandarin) exhibited exceptional grace at the age of 4,
and, he says, by 6, he knew that he was different from other
boys. When he was 9, he staged a hunger strike until he convinced
his father, a military man, to allow him to enroll in the
Chinese army’s dance school. At 18, after grueling years
spent entertaining the nation’s troops, he was declared
China’s best dancer and went on a scholarship to New
York. There, he was “introduced to an alternative lifestyle
in the gay bars on Broadway,” writes Levey. But Jin didn’t
feel like a homosexual. He felt like a woman. In 1995, after
his sex change, Chinese opera houses overflowed with crowds
eager to see this unusual dancer. Tickets went for the equivalent
of half the average monthly salary. “People complain
about the system, saying there is too little freedom in China,”
Jin says. “But there is always enough space to accomplish
something incredible.”
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