The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges. The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. This article is part of Conversation Insights This work has explored how, under Maoist socialism (and especially during the fraught years of the Cultural Revolution) “acceptable” modes of gender and sexuality were largely confined to reproductive, cisgender, and heterosexual coupledom.įollowing Mao’s death in 1976, China’s transition into a market economy, its reconnection with global capitalism and the arrival of the internet have combined to create opportunities for a greater diversity of gender and sexual identities and lives – though these remain subject to state regulation in the form of media censorship and limitations of the activities of feminist and LGBTQ+ activists. The past 20 years have seen increasing research interest in issues of gender and sexuality in China.
I’m here to take a tour of its gay scene and 29-year-old Ah Tao is my guide. With a population of about 198,000 Jiaji is a small city. I turn around to find Ah Tao* hurrying towards me, scrambling over a low hedge. I’m standing in a park watching middle aged women dance in formation to music blaring from a loudspeaker when a voice from behind me shouts: “Ah Kang! Let’s go! I’ll take you to see the place where the gays go to play mahjong.” It’s around 7:30pm on a warm November evening in Jiaji, the county capital of Qionghai, on the east coast of Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China.