Chinese Openness Debuts With Transsexual Dancer

In something of a cultural and sexual milestone for China, modern dancer Jin Xing made her debut Friday night in a packed auditorium owned by the People’s Liberation Army.

Jin was already one of China’s most famous dancers before this event--but as a man.

Beginning in 1989, Jin spent four years in the United States and Italy studying and performing with the Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey dance groups.

His award as “best choreographer” in the 1991 American Dance Festival in North Carolina won the dancer renown in China, which relishes overseas recognition of its cultural and athletic achievements.

But when Jin--who held the rank of army colonel with the PLA dance troupe, where he started at age 9--returned home to China in 1993, he petitioned the government to undergo sex-change operations to become a woman.

He told the government that he was not a homosexual, but he had been sexually attracted to “men who like women.”

“When I was a child, I dreamed of becoming a girl,” he said.

Jin’s dream of dancing as a woman was finally realized Friday.

As the curtain opened, a spotlight caught the dancer in frozen profile sitting in a long silk dress on a park bench set at center stage. Later, she performed in a sheer red chiffon dress that revealed some of the heavy musculature Jin had developed as a male dancer.

“Of course, in society’s eyes, this was a debut for me because of the change,” she said after the performance. “But I approached [it] as another phase in my dancing career. I’m still a little strong for a woman dancer, but the possibilities for expression are greater.”

Surgical and cosmetic sex-change operations are rare in China and require government approval.

According to one report, there are 30,000 cases of Chinese petitioning the government for such procedures. But knowledgeable medical personnel say only a few hundred are likely to be approved each year, depending on the political climate.

In one case that attracted national attention, a Hunan railway maintenance worker overcame her trade union objections and won the right to keep her job after undergoing a sex change in 1994.

But dancer Jin, 28, the ethnic-Korean son of a Shenyang, China, police officer, is by far the most prominent public figure to become a transsexual.

After winning approval from the Culture Ministry, Jin began the series of operations in January 1994 at a specialized cosmetic-surgery hospital west of Beijing.

Senior officials in the Ministry of Culture visited Jin there.

A state television network prepared a documentary on Jin’s life in hopes that it would inspire other Chinese with sexual identity problems.

The sudden openness on the part of the normally puritanical Communist regime was widely viewed as a new trend toward tolerance.

But by the time Jin completed the operations in July and was officially declared a woman by Chinese authorities, the mood in the capital had changed. A summer in which Communist hard-liners had flexed their muscles over Taiwan and dissident issues had put a damper on cultural experimentation.

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During her long hospitalization and treatment, Jin planned a return to the stage with her new 18-member troupe, the Beijing Modern Dance Ensemble.

A sponsor was found, and the performance--to include “Half Dream,” a work Jin had choreographed and performed as a man for the American Dance Festival--was set for this month.

A top Communist bureaucrat who learned of the performance hit the roof, and it was threatened with cancellation.

But after days of tension, someone else in the bureaucracy intervened and the event was permitted, quickly selling out its three performances.