The Ideal Female Ballet Body and the Aesthetic of Thinness

I still remember my childhood in the late 1990s, when I studied dance at the state-owned Children’s Palace in my hometown in Hebei Province.Footnote ⁴ At that time, there were no private dance studios, but the spirit of capitalism had begun to influence how parents mapped out their children’s futures. Many saw pre-professional dance training, rather than formal academic schooling, as a potential shortcut to university admission and, ultimately, a path to upward social mobility.Footnote ⁵ Thus, I witnessed a growing enthusiasm among Chinese parents eager to enroll their daughters in elite programs, such as the Affiliated Secondary School of Beijing Dance Academy (ASS) or other secondary dance schools. Every year in December, tens of thousands of children aged nine to twelve would travel to Beijing to compete for fewer than a hundred places at the school. At institutions like ASS, candidate selection centers around strict physical criteria. Tiaojian (条件), or the “physical condition,” is paramount in determining whether a student possesses the foundational attributes necessary for a professional dance career. My informants consistently confirmed this criterion, and BDA dancers and teachers on social media and television reiterate the importance of physical condition for being a dancer. The ideal physique, summarized as “three long and one small” (long legs, long arms, a long neck, and a small head), is widely regarded as a prerequisite for acceptance into ASS. In the first round of auditions, teachers measured applicants’ body proportions to ensure that their legs, arms, and torso aligned with the rigorous criteria. Legs (from the hip line to heel) must be at least five inches longer than the torso (from the seventh vertebra to the hip line); the arms, when extended sideways, should surpass the student’s height; and a long neck and small head create a slimmer visual profile.Footnote ⁶

The physical measurements, however, are only the starting point of evaluating an ideal ballet body at ASS. The preliminary audition also includes a series of assessments of students’ physical qualities, such as foot arch flexibility (measured by asking students to point and flex the feet), leg extension in splits, external rotation by opening the legs into a diamond and frog positions, and jumping ability. Compared to the admission process before the 1990s, when ASS audition committees would visit local elementary schools to recruit students, children today often train intensively in private studios for at least a year to prepare for the audition. One of my informants, Yuan, who runs a studio in Qinhuangdao, trains more than a hundred students each year, hoping to send many to local dance schools or, ideally, to ASS. Since 2020, ASS has moved the preliminary audition online. Students are required to wear a sleeveless leotard with bare legs and feet, and neatly comb their hair into a bun. Following a set of robotic video instructions, they must display their face, front and side body profiles, and demonstrate various physical qualities. Yuan noted that, with one or multiple years of intense preparation, many students can meet the school’s physical benchmarks; however, as she put it, “they [the school] only select the best.”

To identify the so-called “best” candidates among students across the nation, who often share similar levels of flexibility and turnout, evaluators rely heavily on the crucial standard of “three long and one small.” A long neck, long legs, a small head, and an attractive face represent candidates’ untrainable, innate physical qualities that set them apart. While both the ballet and Chinese dance programs screen applicants based on these standards, the ballet program enforces them more rigorously due to intense competition. In 2020, for instance, more than 50,000 students applied to ASS.Footnote ⁷ The ballet program accepted only thirty students (fifteen girls and fifteen boys), while the Chinese dance program admitted forty-eight students across two classes (Wudao 2020).

Elea, one of my informants, studied Chinese dance at ASS in the 1990s. She also auditioned for the ballet program, but recalled, “I wanted to get into the ballet program. But they turned me down because of my big cheeks.”Footnote ⁸ During our interview in a café, Elea wore skinny jeans that accentuated her long, slender legs, and a black turtleneck sweater that made her face seem even smaller. When I expressed surprise, she emphasized, “The ballet program always chooses the best.” Many of my informants who studied or applied to ASS echoed this sentiment: the ballet program prioritizes students with small heads and attractive faces as an unwritten standard. A mother, who had quit her full-time job to accompany her daughter to study at ASS in Beijing, put it more bluntly, “It is not like you thought that learning ballet would give you long and slender limbs; the ballet dancers you see are one in a million. The bad [bodily] proportions have already been eliminated, or they never had a chance to be seen by the public.”Footnote ⁹ In other words, this rigorous selection process favors candidates who naturally possess the rare, long-limbed, slender aesthetic so prized in the field of ballet.

Once admitted, students must maintain these ideal physiques through a strict regimen of training and self-discipline. To sustain a desirable body shape, students often resort to dieting, cardio workouts (such as running and jumping rope), and occasionally unhealthy dehydration practices. A former ASS ballet student explained,

Throughout their seven years of study, students were made to stand on weighing scales every Monday morning, as teachers read the numbers aloud in front of the entire class. If a student’s weight exceeded a designated limit, she would be punished by doing extra exercises. A current senior ballet student at BDA told me that although teachers no longer weigh students in college, most still diet to control their weight in order to execute jumps more effortlessly and to ease the pressure on their partners during lifts. She said cheerfully, “I just weighed [myself] today. Forty-four kilograms [ninety-seven pounds]. I haven’t seen that number in a long time. My diet works!”Footnote ¹¹ Standing at 5’5 tall, her prominent clavicle and bony upper arms revealed an underweight frame. This dieting culture, which Chinese dance scholar Emily Wilcox refers to as “the discipline of hunger” (Wilcox Reference Wilcox2011), reflects broader expectations of bodily control embedded in ballet training in China.

While the demands for both discipline and thinness are shared across global ballet cultures, the pursuit of an excessively slender body is more openly displayed and socially accepted among Chinese dancers. Dance scholar Rowan McLelland (Reference McLelland2018) notes that both Chinese dancers and non-dancers tend to be thinner than their Western counterparts. In my own experience of living and studying in China, conversations about weight and dieting have become not only a common, but also a socially encouraged topic among women. In a 1996 journal interview, Bai Shuxiang, who is known as China’s first “White Swan,” shared her dieting tips, and the article concluded, “[ballet] dancers’ bodily shape and pose are appreciated and even envied by people… Nowadays, weight loss is a trend” (Cui Reference Cui1996, 3). Since the early 2000s, the phrase “you seem to have lost weight” has become a popular compliment among friends. According to Man (Reference Man2016), the ongoing glorification of slimness and the idealization of a homogeneous standard of beauty are a result of economic globalization and capitalist consumerism.Footnote ¹² Within the contestations and hybridization of cultures inherent to globalization, aestheticized female bodies have become sites of mimicry and competition with the West (Man Reference Man2016). The ideal of the slender Chinese ballet body, therefore, corresponds to the slim aesthetic championed by the Western fashion industry, an aesthetic that, in turn, promotes the ballerina as an embodiment of modernity, elite fashionability, and cosmopolitan physical culture.

Evolving Ideals of Femininity: From Ethereal to Empowered in Western Ballet

In Western classical ballet, female roles have long been central to idealizing a vision of ethereal and controlled womanhood. From the supernatural figure in Giselle (1841) to the princess in The Sleeping Beauty (1889), the image of a ballerina wearing white tights and a delicate tutu, dancing en pointe with a lifted chest and long, extended arms, embodies the weightless grace and aesthetic refinement of classical ballet. When Marie Taglioni first danced en pointe in La Sylphide (1832), the pointe technique evolved into a means of showcasing the aesthetic of ethereality. Ballet critic André Levinson (Reference Levinson, Acocella and Garafola1991) emphasizes that dancing en pointe not only gave the ballerina an appearance of weightlessness but also connected the physicality of dance to a spiritual dimension. This duality reinforces ballet’s aesthetic of otherworldliness, framing the ballerina as a symbol of an unattainable, even divine, female ideal.

Dance critic Deborah Jowitt explores the idealization of lightness within the context of nineteenth-century unease with the body. She writes, “The buoyancy of the female dancer helped her to embody a spiritual aspiration…So female dancers were enthusiastically compared to birds, butterflies, balloons, feathers, moonbeams, shadows, and criticized for showing too much vigor or attack” (Jowitt Reference Jowitt1988, 40). According to Jowitt, the supernatural figures of Romantic ballet served as a cultural escape for the masses during the political unrest of 1830s France. The rise of the middle class and their patronage of ballet also fueled the creation of mysterious, fairy-like spectacles. While the chaste and fragile femininity projected onto ballerinas reflected prevailing male desires of the time, the liberated, otherworldly female characters who lured the hero also embodied erotically potent and seductive women (Alderson Reference Alderson1987; Jowitt Reference Jowitt1988). The image of the pure, ethereal ballerina thus encapsulates complex ideals of nineteenth-century European femininity, which cannot be reduced to a singular aesthetic.

Whether she is cast as a chaste goddess or a femme fatale, the portrayal of women in Romantic ballet was ultimately shaped by a male-dominated social order. Since the late twentieth century, feminist scholars (Chapman Reference Chapman1978; Daly Reference Daly1987, Reference Daly and Desmond1997; Novack Reference Novack and Thomas1993) have fiercely criticized the perpetuation of gender inequality in ballet. Ann Daly, for example, argues that George Balanchine’s ideal woman reinforces the ballerina’s dependence on male manipulation, both in choreography and partnership (1987). Within this critical framework, female dancers’ excessive thinness, with frequent cases of anorexia nervosa, has also drawn sustained concern in dance literature (Brady Reference Brady1982; Gordon Reference Gordon1983; Vincent Reference Vincent and Lawrence1979). Journalist Suzanne Gordon attributes this obsession with slenderness and youth to the infantilization fostered by the hierarchical structure of ballet schools and companies.

While feminist critiques have emphasized the patriarchal structures that define female dancers’ roles, other scholars have pointed to the potential of ballet as a site of female agency and self-empowerment. Scholars such as Sally Banes (Reference Banes1998), Jennifer Fisher (Reference Fisher2007a and Reference Fisher2007b), and Angela McRobbie (Reference McRobbie1991) have examined how dancers can actively engage with and resist traditional gender norms through their performances, claiming their subjectivity and creative autonomy. Although acknowledging ballerinas’ self-discipline, Fisher (Reference Jennifer2003) also recognizes that contemporary dancers are increasingly aware of the dangers of extreme thinness and are working to promote healthier body standards. Interestingly, nineteenth-century critics also took issue with ballerinas’ bony physiques. Jowitt cites balletomane Théophile Gautier’s remark that ballerina Louise Fitzjames “wasn’t even substantial enough to play the part of a shadow” (Jowitt Reference Jowitt1988, 47). This appreciation of a fuller, more voluptuous female body was aligned with nineteenth-century ideals of health and fertility. Despite emerging in different historical periods, critiques of ballerina thinness reveal contrasting ideological frameworks: nineteenth-century French critics view thinness through a patriarchal lens, whereas scholars in the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have approached it from a feminist perspective. These evolving interpretations of the ideal ballerina body reflect changing aesthetics within Western ballet and provide a productive framework for analyzing how the Chinese female ballet body negotiates sociopolitical imaginaries within its own cultural context.

Idealizing the Ballet Body through Traditional Chinese Female Beauty

Moving from nineteenth-century Europe to socialist China in the 1950s, the metaphorical association between ballerinas and spiritual aspiration reappears in Ai Qing’s poem, as shown in the epigraph. While celebrating the ethereal nature of the female dancing body, Ai also highlights the ballerina’s substantiality by describing her as a “goddess among mortals.” Ultimately, he attributes the ballerina’s sublime expression to a “crystal produced by labor,” a metaphor aligning with socialist values of bodily labor and dedication. While Levinson (Reference Levinson, Acocella and Garafola1991) has illustrated the connection between ballerinas’ physical work and their representation of the spiritual realm, the analysis of Ai Qing’s admiration of the female ballet ideal should take into account both the socialist cultural context and the enduring influence of Chinese philosophical traditions. McLelland (Reference McLelland2018) suggests that the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist conceptualization of mind-body unity, alongside parallels between the Confucian notion of li (礼, ritual or etiquette) and Foucauldian “docility,” may help explain the successful migration and domestication of Western ballet in China.Footnote ¹³ She notes that the li, rooted in feudal social hierarchy, functioned to discipline the body in socially acceptable performance, mirroring Foucault’s account of social regulation through bodily control. Yet, Confucianism, I argue, should not be seen as a monolithic or unchanging philosophical system. Rather, the discourse surrounding ideal female beauty in Confucianism has shifted across historical periods. The contemporary Chinese ballet body, therefore, reflects a hybridized configuration of Confucian aesthetics, layered and negotiated through centuries of evolving values. In the following paragraphs, I explore how these shifting ideals of femininity, as shaped by classical Chinese philosophy, continue to resonate in the construction of the modern Chinese ballerina.

Ancient Confucian literature, including The Book of Songs (诗经,11^th – 6^th BCE), Liezi (列子,450 - 375 BCE), Zhuzi (朱子,1270), and Huainanzi (淮南子,179 - 122 BCE), presents a complex image of ideal female beauty. Drawing on these sources, Man summarizes common attributes such as:

Many of the attributes of idealized female beauty found in ancient Chinese literature, including femininity, youthfulness, white skin, a slender physique, and an elongated neck, coincide with the criteria of “three long and one small” in selecting ballet students at BDA. In addition to these aesthetic parallels, the ballerina’s physical devotion and passion towards a lifelong career in ballet mirror the traditional Chinese conception of the virtuous woman, in which outer beauty is intrinsically tied to inner moral worth. As Man (Reference Man2016) notes, the beautiful appearance of women in classical Chinese texts correlates with their ethical and emotional virtues. For instance, Chinese women’s loyalty to and passion for their husbands and nation, as well as their moral courage in the pursuit of justice, are intimately linked to women’s attractiveness in The Book of Songs.

In The Book of Songs, the earliest Confucian classic and the oldest collection of Chinese poetry, dating to the pre-Qin period (476 – 221 BCE), female beauty is consistently articulated through natural and supernatural metaphors.Footnote ¹⁴ In the poem “Sun in the East” (东方之日), part of The Airs of Qi (齐风), a bride’s beauty is likened to the brilliance of the sun and the serenity of the moon. Other favored metaphors in ancient literature, such as flowers, peach trees, blades of white grass, precious gems, and flowing water, evoked the bodily delicacy, slenderness, whiteness, and purity associated with idealized female physiques and desirable virtues. Man (Reference Man2016) explores the profound symbolic connection between water and femininity in The Book of Songs, where water’s soft, tender, and fluid nature epitomizes the lyrical sensibility of idealized women. The motif of water and rivers also functions spatially as a barrier, creating a poetic “aesthetic distance” between the subject and the object, allowing the male gaze to contemplate female beauty from afar (Man Reference Man2016, 53). When likening the female figure to the moon, the sun, and water, ancient poetry constructs a figure of feminine beauty that is inaccessible, illusory, yet eternal, projecting an otherworldly allure. Later interpretations continued to imagine the ideal woman through the lens of the supernatural. For instance, since the Han Dynasty (202 BCE – 9 CE), “a wandering woman” ( younü , 游女) beside the Han River in the poem “Han Guang” (汉广) has been read as the goddess of the Han River (Cowhig Reference Cowhig2022; Liu Reference Liu2017). These divine analogies anticipate Ai Qing’s poetic tribute to Ulanova, in which the ballerina is described as moonlight, cloud, and an otherworldly goddess, evoking these desirable feminine qualities. His admiration towards Ulanova projects a Confucian male fantasy of female beauty onto the dancing body of the ballerina, which echoes the nineteenth-century European male desire for the ethereal female ideal.

The aestheticization of whiteness in The Book of Songs, as a key symbol of female elegance and purity, also resonated with the visual codes of ballet blanc, or white ballet, in classical repertoire. In these works, supernatural female characters adorned in white tutus, such as the nymph in La Sylphide (1832), the white swan in Swan Lake (1877/1895), the shades in La Bayadere (1977), and the snowflakes in The Nutcracker (1892), embody an innocent and otherworldly femininity. The ancient Chinese poetry similarly extolled whiteness through referencing white plants, such as white grass (春荑) and creamy balm (凝脂), to illustrate the luminous smoothness of ideal female skin. White garments, too, signified not only aesthetic refinement and chastity but also became a representation of the elite social class and the elegant behavior of women.Footnote ¹⁵ In the poem “Outside the Eastern Gate” (出其东门), a woman dressed in a white dress stood out and was more unforgettable among the other women, clad in more flamboyant colors, capturing a refined and memorable beauty amid visual excess.

The symbolic economy of whiteness, however, is not unique to Chinese tradition. In Western contexts, the color white also connotes purity, simplicity, and moral virtue, a legacy stemming from Christian rituals in which priests wore white cassocks during sacred ceremonies (Akbar Reference Akbar1996; Dyer Reference Dyer1997). Later, the binary between white/light and black/dark in Christian thought became foundational to European nationalism during colonial expansion and was ultimately promoted global White supremacy (Blay Reference Blay2011). Thus, in the context of hybrid postsocialist culture, the idealization of ballerinas in white tutus draws from both Chinese and Western traditions that associate whiteness with feminine chastity and cultural refinement.

Aligning with the complex interpretation of the ideal woman as both unattainable and seductive in Romantic ballet, The Book of Songs also includes sexual innuendos and erotic descriptions of women’s physical appearance. The poem “In the Wild is a Dead Doe” (野有死麕), for example, portrays a young woman longing for romantic and sexual intimacy. Yet this sexually attractive female beauty in pre-Qin Confucianism is conspicuously absent in contemporary Chinese ballet training. Instead, the aesthetic and pedagogical discourses surrounding the Chinese female ballet body emphasize the repression of female secondary sexual characteristics, reflecting a return to the ascetic female image espoused by orthodox neo-Confucianism in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368-1912). When analyzing ballet bodies of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, Chinese dance critic Liu Qingyi imbues a traditional Confucianist vision, describing that female ballet dancers are fairies who possess “thin breasts, narrow pelvis, and flat bellies” (Liu Reference Liu2004, 11). A fleshy breast, she argues, “visually renders a sense of bulk and unwieldiness” that disrupts the ethereal effect of ballerinas’ airborne movements, whereas a “thin chest” with ribs exposed produces a vision of refinement and lightness and offers audiences “an appreciation of beauty” (Liu Reference Liu2004, 10). My own ethnographic research at BDA confirms this repression of female body parts that signal women’s sexual maturity and fertility. Many young female students at ASS and their mothers expressed anxiety over the early development of sexual features in adolescence. A mother confided during her daughter’s final performance in fourth grade, “She grows so fast, look at her breasts and big thighs. She has to lose more weight.”Footnote ¹⁶ Another informant who graduated from ASS in 2003 also recalled how her curvier classmate, Chen Xiaoyun, now an actress in China, had to give up ballet due to her large build and full chest.

In addition to a thin chest, a narrow pelvis and a small backside are also considered essential qualities for female ballet dancers. When observing ballet classes, I frequently heard teachers instructing students to “squeeze their buttocks.” In a pas de deux class at ASS, as shown in the documentary “Dancing into the National Centre for the Performing Arts” (BTV 2013), the teacher halted the students in a duet pose where male dancers held their female partners’ waists in a penché position. Approaching the front couple, she suddenly slapped the girl’s rear and exclaimed, “Big buttock, tuck it in!” Wearing a simple black leotard and white tights, the girl’s body shape was clearly exposed. As she immediately reacted to the teacher’s slap, the girl attempted to conceal her backside by tucking her pelvis forward. However, this adjustment only weakened her leg turnout, prompting further corrections. Such vocal and physical corrections are common in daily classes at ASS, where students often experience embarrassment early in their training. Liu explains that the rejection of fleshy buttocks in ballet serves both aesthetic and technical purposes: to “prevent the shortening of legs caused by loosened hip muscles” and to “eliminate vulgar posture” (Liu Reference Liu2004, 11). She further elaborates,

In Liu’s analysis, the repression of female sexuality through ballet training cultivates a “pure and noble” (冰清玉洁) image of women, whose bodily abstinence mirrors their moral chastity and nobility. This convergence of physical constraint and spiritual transcendence also echoes the Confucian ideal of mind-body unity and aligns with the patriarchal gaze sustained by the late imperial Confucianism.

The conservative Confucianist moral framework of repressing the exposure of female bodies also underpins critiques of ballet during socialist China. In 1950, Chinese dance pioneer Dai Ailian choreographed “Peace Dove,” a dance drama that combined Western classical ballet and modern dance to celebrate the World Peace Council and the newly established PRC’s National Day. Archival photos show dancers who performed as doves wearing short, bell-shaped white tutus and elaborate white headbands, standing in an arabesque position with one leg stretched out backward. While Peace Dove received praise from many in the dance community, film critic Zhong Dianfei criticized the dancers’ attire, famously complaining that the stage was “filled with thighs; workers, peasants, and soldiers despise” (Wilcox Reference Wilcox2018; Zhong Reference Zhong1950).Footnote ¹⁸ Zhong’s remark, which became widely quoted in the dance field, reflected the mass audience’s discomfort with the exposure of female bodies on stage. I argue that it also reflected a class-based unease with ballet’s elite origins. Introduced to middle- and upper-class Chinese audiences by Russian and European immigrants since the 1920s, ballet remained largely inaccessible to working-class communities until after the founding of the PRC. In socialist China, the localization of communism was not only a political project but also a cultural practice that absorbed elements of conservative Confucianism into state governance. Within the hybrid ideological framework, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appropriated the Confucian demand for female bodily abstinence to enforce a socialist gender uniformity and to fuel the class struggle against bourgeois and capitalist culture. Thus, Zhong’s critique reveals how patriarchal Confucian notions of modesty and morality were mobilized by CCP leftists to denounce ballet as bourgeois and foreign.

Despite the economic reform and cultural liberalization of the postsocialist era, which liberated women’s bodies from the severe constraints of the Maoist era, the sexual repression embedded in ballet training persists. It reveals an enduring neo-Confucian male desire for the “pure and noble” female body. As many Confucian scholars have observed, unlike the asceticism of neo-Confucianism, early Confucianism, particularly in the pre-Qin period, held a relatively permissive attitude toward sexuality and human desire (Pang White Reference Pang White2016; Wu Reference Wu2007; Xu Reference Xu2006). Man (Reference Man2016) similarly characterizes the diverse, spontaneous, and elegant representations of female beauty in The Book of Songs as a “lost horizon,” a cultural heritage distinct from the homogenous “artificial” and “calculating” female ideals promoted in contemporary China. Man notes that young women’s pursuit of ideal bodies is attainable through cosmetics, fashion, and anti-aging products, influenced by a revived male gaze and capitalist consumerism.

As I argued in this section, the contemporary idealization of Chinese ballerinas enacts a layered embodiment of Confucian conceptions of the female body as they have evolved across different historical periods. While the erasure of female sexual traits recalls the bodily abstinence valorized in late imperial neo-Confucianism, the ballerina’s cultivated slenderness, grace, vitality, and moral discipline echo female ideals from classical Confucian texts such as The Book of Songs. These values are not merely aesthetic preferences but operate as embodied expressions of a moral-political vision, where the body is both subject to discipline and a vehicle for transcendence. Strikingly, this Confucian vision finds unexpected resonance in Western ballet, where ethereal aesthetic, restrained femininity, and spiritual transcendence reflect histories of moral regulation, patriarchal desire, and elite cultural formation. The convergence of the Confucian and Eurocentric frameworks produces a hybridized ideal, in which the disciplined ballet body performs not only beauty and virtue but also the sociopolitical imaginaries of a postsocialist, cosmopolitan China. Thus, the labor of the female ballet body refracts not only a composite aesthetic ideal, shaped by Western courtly traditions and indigenous philosophical frameworks, but is also repurposed to serve contemporary national and political ambitions, an entanglement I will further examine in the following section.

Laboring Female Ballet Body and the State

Since the establishment of socialist China, Western classical ballet Swan Lake (1877/1895) has become the most frequently staged ballet, admired by Chinese politicians, intellectuals, and mass audiences alike. The image of the pure, devoted white swan resonated with ideals of femininity in Chinese thought while symbolizing a national aspiration to engage with prestigious Western cultural forms. As described in the documentary Ballet (2010) by China’s Central Television (CCTV), “For people in the 1950s, ballet was Swan Lake, and Swan Lake was myth and happiness.”Footnote ¹⁹ In 1958, the Soviet ballet expert Petr Gusev first staged the full-length Swan Lake at the Beijing Dance School (BDS, now BDA) as the graduation performance for its senior students. The documentary’s voiceover celebrates that BDS for applying the spirit of “dare to think and dare to act” (敢想敢干, gan xiang gan gan) in staging a world-famous ballet during the Great Leap Forward [1958-1962] and claims that BDS dancers had reached “international standards” in their dance technique (CCTV 2010).Footnote ²⁰ Although the performance fell short of meeting the established international technical benchmarks, evidenced in the lead ballerina’s limited leg turnout and sloppy arms, the discourses surrounding the ballet’s symbolic value far exceeded its artistic execution. The recognition of Swan Lake as a prestigious “world-famous ballet” and the drive to match “international standards” revealed a tension between socialist revolutionary ideals and a form of nationalist cosmopolitanism, one that sought to adopt elite Western art to assert China’s cultural parity and global modernity. The laboring bodies of BDS students thus became emblems of an alleged socialist achievement and global aspiration, an ambivalence that continued to exist in contemporary state-sponsored performances.

In this section, I analyze the BDA ballerinas’ performance of Swan Lake at the 2016 G20 Summit gala in Hangzhou. Drawing on American anthropologist Lisa Rofel’s concept of “domestication of cosmopolitanism” (2007), I examine how Chinese artists engaged with Western ballet as a global cultural practice and reframed it as a means to assert cultural autonomy and nationalism. While modern cosmopolitanism promotes a vision of universal belonging among individuals worldwide as “global citizens” (Appiah Reference Appiah and Nussbaum2002, Reference Appiah2006; Beck Reference Beck2000, Reference Beck2006; Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum and Cohen2002), Rofel argues that in China, cosmopolitanism functions as a state-sanctioned discourse under the framework of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Through this lens, individuals and groups in China actively “embrace, digest, rework, contest, and resist” global cultural forms to define their own modernity and identity (Rofel Reference Rofel2007, 112). For Rofel, cosmopolitanism becomes a site of negotiation, allowing Chinese people to navigate the pressures and opportunities of globalization. On one side of this negotiation lies a desire to transcend local identities and join a universal culture, while on the other is a selective adaptation of cosmopolitan ideas, which, according to Rofel, entails domestication to reshape global influences in alignment with local identities and state agendas.

Desiring heterosexual female figures are central in embodying the tensions of China’s cosmopolitanism. Man (Reference Man2016) draws on Rofel’s framework to examine the tailor-made “Olympic girls” during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Man suggests that these elegantly dressed volunteers symbolized a new Chinese identity and promoted national pride through their cheongsam-inspired attire, their poised and delicate gait, and smiles carefully angled to conceal the visibility of their teeth (Man Reference Man2016). While both Man and Rofel emphasize the significance of female bodily representation, neither addresses the more prolonged and often contentious intellectual history of cosmopolitanism in modern China. Literature scholars Fugui Zhang and Chuangong Ren (2012) trace this history by comparing cosmopolitanism with the Confucian ideal of datong (大同, Great Harmony) and Soviet-inspired socialist internationalism. They argue that while datong envisions a global moral community akin to Western cosmopolitan ideals, socialist internationalism incorporates implications of class struggle and revolutionary collectivism, diverging from cosmopolitan emphasis on eliminating class distinctions (Zhang and Ren Reference Zhang and Ren2012). Although Rofel acknowledges the continuity of socialist internationalism in contemporary cosmopolitanism, she tends to frame Chinese responses to globalization in overly binary terms, such as local versus global and Chinese versus Western. Additionally, her notion of “domestication” also risks reinforcing a separation between East and West by implying that cosmopolitanism is inherently Western and positioning China as a mere recipient rather than a co-producer of global modernity.

The conceptual limitations in Rofel’s analysis echo Chinese artists’ problematic framing of Western culture as a universal ideal, while they simultaneously deploy Chinese ballet bodies as symbols of moral purity and nationalist pride. Unpacking the concept of “domesticated cosmopolitanism” helps illuminate how Chinese artists and state discourses both reinforce and resist Western cultural hegemony through the laboring bodies of Chinese ballerinas. Moreover, I suggest that the objectification of female dancing bodies complicates, and ultimately undermines, the patriarchal authority invoked in performances of cosmopolitanism and nationalism.

On the evening of September 4, 2016, leaders of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou attended the gala “Memories of Hangzhou,” directed by Zhang Yimou, renowned for his work on the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and many internationally awarded films. Built on the surface of West Lake, the entire production featured an immersive stage that blended traditional Chinese music and dance, Tai Chi, and Western ballet and symphonic music. It culminated in a patriotic crescendo combining Chinese anthems and Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”Footnote ²¹ In a CCTV interview, Zhang emphasized the production’s technological novelty, claiming that “this may be the first Swan Lake ever performed on an actual lake since its creation” and that the application of holographic dancers reflected “technology-human interaction” (Zhang Reference Zhang2016).Footnote ²²

Performed by twenty-six BDA ballerinas, the G20 excerpt of Swan Lake included the “Swan Theme” and “Dance of the Little Swans” from Act II of the classical repertoire.Footnote ²³ In the CCTV broadcast, the dancers’ bodies collaborated with their water reflections and digital stagecraft to create an ethereal spectacle. In the opening sequence, Odette, performed by a soloist in a white tutu and glittering crown, appears to float and glide weightlessly across the dark surface of West Lake, framed by a glowing arch and her own shimmering reflection. Her fluid arms and expanded white tutu, echoed by the luminous bridge above, are harmoniously mirrored in the water below, creating a dreamlike tableau. As the orchestration swells, pairs of virtual ballerinas emerge beside Odette, multiplying her image as though spectral doubles had rippled outward from her body. The choreography foregrounds classical ballet aesthetics through synchronized arabesques, swift bourrée en pointe , and delicate flying arms, while omitting narrative elements like the prince. Both live and virtual dancers contribute to the spectacle, enhanced by the illuminous bridge whose mirrored arc alludes to the Daoist harmony of yin and yang. This unique stage setting also references Hangzhou’s iconic landmark bridge and the G20’s bridge-shaped logo, symbolizing the interconnection of the twenty countries in “global economic growth, international cooperation, and a win-win future.”Footnote ²⁴ Below the arch of the bridge, rows of virtually and physically identical ballerinas appear in perfect symmetry; their luminous reflections on the lake surface heighten the visual enchantment and further dissolve Odette’s corporeality. As the sequence concludes, hundreds of virtual ballerinas emerge beneath the arch with rapid bourrées and flying arms, while groups of live dancers run from each side of the arch as if stepping forth from their virtual projections.

Accompanied by the playful music of the “Dance of the Little Swans,” twenty-four dancers hold hands and recreate the iconic choreography atop an immense platform just inches beneath the lake surface, crafting the illusion of dancing directly on the water. Their spatial transitions are meticulously orchestrated, and their interlinked arms resemble a chain of paper dolls gently moving in unison across the water. Close-up shots focus on their pointed feet as they splash delicately in the shallows, showcasing the taut precision of their legs and synchronized steps. Even as the ensemble splits into symmetrical formations during the middle phrases, the choreography flows seamlessly, eventually rejoining into a single, unified line. With their remarkable virtuosity, the dancers execute entrechats and crisp leg beats on the watery stage as effortlessly as on dry ground. Their unified coupé and matching arabesque leg lifts render them nearly indistinguishable from one another. The performance culminates in a return to the “Swan Theme,” as two soloists reappear on the platform, joined by virtual dancers gliding beneath the luminous bridge. The visual fantasy finishes in a breathtaking symmetrical tableau, with the live ballerinas gracefully lifting one arm overhead in the swan’s signature pose.

After the innovative and dazzling performance of Swan Lake, Chinese state media foregrounded the physical labor of the BDA ballerinas. Choreographer Gao Zhiyi explained to Qilu Evening News that “when dancing on the ground, a movement transition might only need eight counts, but on the 3000-square-meter [32,291-square-feet] platform [the movement] cannot be accomplished within two eight counts” (Guo Reference Guo2016). To meet these demands, the dancers trained ten to twelve hours daily, expanding their movement range on the submerged stage while maintaining the swift, ethereal quality expected of the corps de ballet . The metal platform, Gao described, was set 1.2 inches below the surface of Wester Lake and created the illusion of dancers gliding across water. During rehearsals, however, the stage was submerged one inch deeper, to help the dancers adapt to water resistance and slipperiness (CCTV News 2016). After the first rehearsal on the Lake, many dancers expressed that it was extremely challenging to move with their feet submerged in water (CCTV News 2016). Choreographer Tao Wenting emphasized the need to strengthen the dancers’ bodies through “rehearsing in water as much as possible” (CCTV News 2016). Over fifty-five days of rehearsal, the dancers began each day with ballet classes in a Hangzhou studio before moving to the outdoor platform, enduring water resistance, soaking shoes, slippery stage, and intense summer heat.

In addition to the corps de ballet ’s struggles, soloist Sun Yimeng, a former principal with the Finnish National Ballet, faced the added difficulty of performing on a narrow, precarious moving flatform, which is only 39-inch-wide, while staying in sync with pre-recorded virtual imagery (CCTV News 2016). Meanwhile, four understudy dancers from BDA trained alongside the cast but never had no opportunity to perform (Huang and Du Reference Huang and Qimeng2016). BDA leader and teacher Guan Yu praised the dancers’ endurance, stating that,

Guan’s statement echoes a socialist ethos also seen in Ai Qing’s poem, which similarly celebrates the dancer’s physical labor as a means of spiritual cultivation. The valorization of endurance aligns with Confucian ideals of female virtue through bodily restraint and moral devotion. The fusion of socialist and Confucian ideologies projected through BDA ballerinas constructs a unique Chinese moral heritage while also legitimizing a domesticated form of cosmopolitanism.

Yet the desire to transcend locality and domesticate cosmopolitanism, through the laboring ballet bodies and the entire hybrid G20 performance, reinforces a Eurocentric narrative. In a CCTV interview, director Zhang justified his selection of repertoire for the G20 gala:

Zhang further claims that Western symphonic music and ballet are elegant and elite “universal languages” capable of conveying themes of love, unity, power, beauty, and nature, ideals resonate with all human beings (Zhang Reference Zhang2016). To transcend local Chinese culture to a realm of cultural universalism and simultaneously “domesticate” global culture, Zhang curated a hybrid gala that merged Western and Chinese classical elements within a series of visually stunning performances. These included a Chinese opera and classical dance adaptation of the well-known Chinese tale, Butterfly Lovers, with the dance set to symphonized music; a duet between traditional Chinese guqin (zither 古琴) and Western cello; and a grand finale featuring Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, accompanied by a dazzling fountain display where splashes were created by dancers instead of mechanical instruments. While Swan Lake functioned as an iconic Western ballet within this program, Zhang’s strategy for its “domestication” was to cast Chinese ballet dancers performing against emblematic national backdrops, such as West Lake and the stylized bridge, to express Chineseness through a hybrid and visual spectacle.

While embracing Western classical forms as universal ideals, China’s artists also challenged its cultural hegemony through the approach of nationalism. By combining “world-famous repertoire” with “Chinese repertoire” in the G20 gala, Zhang also sought to articulate an inclusive, versatile, and transcendent Chineseness, asserting China’s global prominence. In an interview for China’s Youth, Guan Yu expressed this ambition, saying that “the choreographic team especially wanted to come up with [a show] that would make foreigners feel dazzled and [to render] a beautiful and [high] level performance that they [the foreigner/the West] have never achieved” (Guan Reference Guan2016).Footnote ²⁵ Echoing Zhang’s claim that Swan Lake had never been staged on a lake before, Guan’s words underscore a nationalist ambition to rewrite and surpass Western standards through a distinctly Chinese manner. Thus, the docile yet virtuoso female ballet bodies incarnated the dual logic of Chinese cosmopolitanism: by performing a world-famous ballet repertoire, they embodied a transcendent cultural mastery, while simultaneously accomplishing the seemingly impossible mission of dancing en pointe on the water, an act of domestication and contestation that reimagines global forms through a nationalist lens. In light of China’s ambition to assume a leading role in the international order, this cosmopolitan rewriting enacted through Chinese ballet bodies implies not only an assertion of national pride but also an emerging ideology of Chinese supremacy masked within the language of cultural inclusivity and aesthetic achievement.

While the female ballet bodies served as symbols of patriarchal nationalism, their objectification and erasure complicated the national agenda of cosmopolitanism. In explaining the decision to eliminate the role of Prince Siegfried from the G20 Swan Lake, choreographer Tao Wenting stated that replacing the traditional male-female leads with “two [female] big swans” better reflected the G20 summit’s goal of unity (CCTV News 2016). She suggested that the duet between two swans could “better embody innovation, as well as a balanced, inclusive, and harmonious relationship between participating countries” (CCTV News 2016).Footnote ²⁶ Yet this rationale stresses a stereotypical binary of masculinity and femininity, implying that the presence of a male dancer might disrupt the visual equilibrium offered by docile, unthreatening female bodies, bodies reimagined as vessels for an imagined universal cosmopolitanism. At the same time, Tao’s emphasis on female representation was undermined by the performance’s disrespectful erasure of their labor. In the CCTV broadcast, while each segment was introduced with a subtitle, only the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the three production choreographers were credited; the dancers themselves remained unnamed. This omission rendered invisible the tremendous physical effort, discipline, and rehearsal that underpinned the spectacle, further reducing the dancers to mere instruments of state symbolism.

Moreover, the entire G20 gala, staged during the brief interlude between the two-day summit negotiations, was feminized as a soft power, simplified by Zhang and state media as a “business card” to the world (Zhang Reference Zhang2016). This feminization, however, was also complicit with postcolonial discourses of self-Orientalism (Dirlik Reference Dirlik1996) and Occidentalism (Chen Reference Chen1995), whereby China represented itself through tropes that would appeal to and align with Western expectations of the “exotic” and “harmonious” East. As I have argued elsewhere (Cui Reference Cui2023), Chinese dance practitioners often engage in self-Orientalist strategies to create unique Chinese dance forms that both compete within and seek validation from a Western-dominated cultural order and to gain a recognition from foreign (Western) audiences. In Zhang’s G20 production, the application of traditional Chinese costumes and instruments, projected images of fan patterns, the illuminated lakeside pavilion, and the pairing of Chinese classical dance with symphonic arrangements all reflected a self-Orientalist approach in asserting Chineseness. While Zhang claimed to integrate Chinese culture into a vision of global harmony, his embrace of Western cultural universalism ultimately reproduced long-standing hierarchies of power, reaffirming rather than subverting China’s postcolonial relationship to the global order.