Jin Xing

Jin Xing (born 13 August 1967) is a Chinese dancer, choreographer and television host. She is the most prominent openly transgender public figure in China and the founder of the Jin Xing Dance Theater in Shanghai.

She was born in Shenyang, Liaoning, to a Chosŏnjok (Korean Chinese) family and attended a Korean-language school. At nine she joined the People's Liberation Army to train in dance with a troupe of the Shenyang Military Region; she graduated from the People's Liberation Army Art Academy in 1984, returned to the Shenyang military dance troupe and rose to the rank of colonel. In 1985 she won first place in the youth category of the first Taoli Cup dance competition with a men's pointe dance of her own creation. She then went to New York on a scholarship to study modern dance, training under pioneers such as Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, and performed and taught dance in Europe.

She returned to China in 1993 and in 1995 underwent sex reassignment surgery in Beijing, one of the first people in the country to do so. In 1996 she set up the Beijing Modern Dance Company in cooperation with the Beijing culture bureau, and in 1999 she founded China's first independent dance troupe, the Jin Xing Dance Theater, in Shanghai. Her honours include an honorary doctorate in arts from Dartington College of Arts at the University of Plymouth (2006), the rank of Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters (2012) and an honorary doctorate in dance from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2014), and she was named one of the BBC's 100 Women in 2017.

On screen, she appeared in the Korean film Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002) and the Thai film Tom-Yum-Goong (2005). From 2013 she worked as a judge on a television dance competition, hosted the talk show The Jin Xing Show on Dragon TV from 2015 to 2017, and from 2016 hosted the dating show Chinese Dating with the Parents. Since 2021 several of her shows have been shut down or her credits removed, and she has publicly protested against censorship by the authorities; in 2024 her troupe's tour of the stage play Sunrise was cancelled in several Chinese cities, effectively banning it in China.

She has adopted three children and in 2005 married her German husband, Heinz Gerd Oidtmann; they live in Shanghai.