The Oprah of China Just Happens to Be Transgender

Jin Xing has 100 million viewers a week, was once a male ballet star hailed by The New York Times, served as an army colonel and now is a trailblazer in her conservative nation (just don’t compare her to Caitlyn Jenner).

- Abid Rahman

Jin Xing, China’s most popular TV hostess, has been many things in her life: dance prodigy, prima ballerina, decorated colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, choreographer, actress, wife and mother of three. She also has been a man.

The son of ethnic Korean parents — her father was a bureaucrat in the army and her mother a translator — Jin was born in 1967 in Shenyang, a provincial northeast city in mainland China. As early as 4 she felt she was different, not just in terms of her sexual identity but also thanks to a precocious talent for dance that would, by age 9, result in her admission to a prestigious troupe within the People’s Army (traditional dance and acrobatics are considered strong propaganda tools within the Chinese military). For the next 10 years, Jin’s rise through the ranks of the military would follow two distinctly different paths: As a promising member of the dance troupe, she studied Russian ballet, Chinese opera, dancing and acrobatics; as a soldier, she became proficient with machine guns and learned how to place bombs delicately under bridges.

Her post-military life was no less ambitious. She became an acclaimed dancer during a stint in New York, founded her own dance troupe in Shanghai and adopted three children whom she raised on her own until her marriage in 2005. Her career as a TV personality skyrocketed thanks to regular appearances as a judge on a local version of So You Think You Can Dance, where she was a fan favorite for her withering takedowns (she often reduced young aspiring dancers to tears, earning her the name Poison Tongue on social media). Her popularity eventually led to The Jin Xing Show, a wildly successful variety/chat program — it’s viewed by an estimated 100 million every week — that includes a dance competition, with Jin as the sole judge. She has been a woman since undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 1995.