SUPER GIRL MAKES SHANGHAI LOOK TWICE

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 SHANGHAI 000331 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS DEPT FOR EAP/CM, DRL STATE PASS FOR USTR STRATFORD, WINTER, MCCARTIN, ALTBACH, READE TREAS FOR AMB HOLMER, WRIGHT, TSMITH TREAS FOR OASIA - DOHNER/HAARSAGER/KUSHMAN USDOC FOR ITA/MAC - DAS KASOFF, MELCHER, MCQUEEN NSC FOR WILDER AND TONG HHS FOR OGHA/STEIGER AND AMER BHAT E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV PHUM SOCI TBIO CH SUBJECT: SUPER GIRL MAKES SHANGHAI LOOK TWICE REF: A) SHANGHAI 318 B) SHANGHAI 324 C) SHANGHAI 326 D) 2006 SHANGHAI 5783 (U) Sensitive but unclassified. Not for dissemination outside USG channels; not for Internet distribution. ¶1. (U) Summary: According to contacts in Shanghai's gay community, the Internet had provided this once isolated community with a private and safe space to organize and communicate among themselves. In addition, the Super Girl and Good Man TV shows, singing talent competitions similar to American Idol, presented a new and different type of exposure for the gay community. Not only have the shows' winners popularized a certain "look," but they also challenged traditional Chinese concepts of sexuality and male and female behavior. This is the last of four cables updating the social, medical, media and legal trends in the gay community in Shanghai. End Summary. -------------- SUPER GIRL AND THE "BEAUTIFUL NEUTRAL SEX" -------------- ¶2. (SBU) In a series of discussions with Poloff in April, gay and lesbian contacts said that the media had helped to increase public awareness of homosexuals. A twenty-something lesbian who moved from Beijing to Shanghai thanked China's popular TV show Super Girl for making the "butch" style fashionable. She attributed her recent ability to fit-in with mainstream society to the first Super Girl winner, Li Yuchun, whose victory was watched by around 400 million TV viewers. She said that "Li Yuchun and Zhou Bichang (a later winner) made the lesbian butch-look and lesbians acceptable." She said most lesbians viewed Li Yuchun and Zhou Bichang as lesbians, and she also cited many of last year's competitors as gay, claiming to have known one from a gay venue in Beijing. Both Li Yuchun and Zhou Bichang have refused to comment publicly on their sexuality when approached by journalists. ¶3. (SBU) Another Shanghainese lesbian shared a similar view and noted that Good Man, the male equivalent of Super Girl, also did a lot to make gay Shanghainese people more comfortable in public. She believed both shows put gay personalities in the �0A;spotlight and humanized gay people to greater China. She pointed out that many girls in China, straight and gay, now wear their hair modeled after Li Yuchun's boyish spikes. Individuals in the gay community also mentioned that after the first and second Super Girl competitions aired, the Chinese media appeared to become more "gay-friendly" by overtly covering more gay issues. Several noted that gay people appeared on the Phoenix TV talk show Lu Yulian without hiding their faces or disguising their voices. Fudan University School of Public Health Professor Gao Yanning commented that Super Girl "sold post-modernism well to China and proved that post-modernism exists in China." He noted that people were beginning to think twice about what it meant to be Chinese and that this could have more than one definition. ¶4. (SBU) On several websites devoted to the Super Girl Show, fans argued that neither of the Super Girl winners was gay but of a "middle sex" or neuter. One site, www.lady.163.com, had postings from Super Girl fans praising both Super Girls' "neutral" beauty: "Neutral characteristics contributed a lot to the success of Li Yuchu--dressed in female clothes, Li looked gentle and lovely. Dressed in male clothes, Li looked handsome." A gay Shanghainese man said that Li Yuchun's and Zhou Bichang's success told Chinese society "that there were many types of people in China, which was a good thing." Whether neuter, gay or straight, one gay Shanghai resident pointed out that both Super Girl and Good Man winners made Chinese start to consider sexuality. "Previously people would not wonder about this if someone was single and above 30," he said. ¶5. (SBU) Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV launched its first program about gay and lesbian issues on April 5, 2007. The show, "Tongxing Xianglian," Gay Connections, was a 12-part weekly series and aired on the station's website on Thursdays at 3 PM. SHANGHAI 00000331 002 OF 003 AIDS activist and Chi Heng Foundation employee Didier George was the host of the show, which featured interviews with gay Chinese. After watching a clip of the show, a senior doctor who focused on public health in the gay community expressed some concern. He remarked that although the show offered "an opportunity to open windows on gay life," it also revealed that people viewed homosexuality as a disease or abnormality. One viewer asked, "gay people are only a minority so why spend so much time and effort advocating them?" -------------- The Virtual Gay Community -------------- ¶6. (SBU) The Internet has served as a major force in bringing together gay, lesbian and transgender individuals, giving them a safe space to explore questions outside family or social pressures. In Shanghai, Internet access is easily obtained at low rates; prices at Internet bars ranged between 2-3 RMB/hour. Whereas gay bars were limited and lesbian bars were almost nonexistent, gay and lesbian websites were plentiful and rarely faced censorship. ¶7. (SBU) A 23-year old gay male from the northern city of Jilin attended university in Beijing and then moved to Shanghai after hearing about the gay-friendly environment. In addition to his work as freelance public relations executive, he helped to create Shanghai LGBT, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shanghailgbt/, the first Shanghai-specific lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender web group on yahoo.com. Shanghai LGBT's main goal was to counter the divide between the lesbian and gay population and also to include straight people interested in having gay friends or learning more about gay issues. The postings were in English, and the group initially had only one Chinese member, but local Shanghainese now make up about 20 percent of the approximately 270 members. ¶8. (SBU) Fudan University School of Public Health graduate student Lin Kin has been researching mainland-China created websites with gay content to determine what effect they had on controlling diseases. She has identified more than 200 websites related to the gay community but could only open about 100 of the sites because the rest were either "dead" or blocked by the government. To be included in Lin's count, a website needed to have an independent WWW address and could not simply be a chat group within a larger portal. Of the 100 sites, 58 percent were dedicated to both gay men and women, 35.7 percent were aimed at gay men, and 5.4 percent were for lesbian users. ¶9. (SBU) Liu said that websites that catered to gay users were similar in content to other websites, featuring articles about the entertainment industry, news and other current event topics. However, most contained forums for meeting friends or chatrooms devoted to discussing gay relationships, coming out and sometimes health issues. Many sites featured ads to find companions and even ads from gay couples seeking lesbian couples to enter into convenience marriages and live as neighbors. One of the most popular websites, www.pybk.com, is based in Beijing and has over 450,000 users who pay a fee to access the site. PYBK was geared towards both genders and was mainly used to find friends. Shanghai-based www.aladao.net targeted lesbians and has around 10,000 users. ¶10. (SBU) Lin said that it was difficult to determine the level of censorship of gay websites. Most websites had multiple domain names, possibly to avoid the government blocking the site under one name. Lin pointed out that she could not access www.aibai.cn, a site hosted by Aibai Culture and Education Centre, a Beijing-based group serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. The site was not known to offer pornographic material and had registered correctly for a government IP address. In March 2006, a similar site by Aibai, hosted on an overseas server, was blocked and later resurfaced under the above address. The site provided Chinese translations SHANGHAI 00000331 003 OF 003 of gay media coverage from around the world. Lin heard that the site was only blocked in certain cities in China, including Shanghai. ¶11. (SBU) According to Dr. Gao Yanning and another senior doctor in Shanghai, who asked not to be named, almost every gay website had accurate information on health issues. Any incorrect information was usually quickly brought to the site manager's attention by web users. Many sites featured advertisements for online applications for HIV/AIDS tests. To sign up for the test, the user clicked on the ad and entered his or her e-mail address to get a secret code. With the secret code, the user could go to a testing center, have the HIV/AIDS test, and receive the results back by e-mail the next day. Other online tests were self-evaluations where users could answer a series of questions to determine if they had views or sexual behavior that put them at high risk for contracting HIV/AIDS. ¶12. (SBU) Lin said that most of the information on health issues related to educating gay men on how to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases. She found little, if any, information about health on the sites devoted to lesbian users. Those sites contained articles related to emotions or mental health, or even instructions on how to have sex. She also found many articles in health sections of lesbian sites about beauty and make-up. Lin said there was generally less information around the world about lesbian health, and that "women have less time and money to go online." She added that "in China, women have less education and any health education is about how to take care of a baby or maternal health." -------------- COMMENT -------------- ¶13. (SBU) The Internet continues to provide an outlet for different groups of Chinese society to interact and seek specialized information. The gay community online appears to be driven primarily by and for male users, which may be a result of women having a lower level of education about sexuality and health issues. TV shows such as Super Girl and Good Man provide an interesting twist in helping to bring questions about sexuality into popular thought. JARRETT