VZCZCXRO1987
RR RUEHCN RUEHGH
DE RUEHGH #0331/01 1520222
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 010222Z JUN 07
FM AMCONSUL SHANGHAI
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 5889
INFO RUEHBJ/AMEMBASSY BEIJING 1144
RUEHCN/AMCONSUL CHENGDU 0698
RUEHSH/AMCONSUL SHENYANG 0700
RUEHGZ/AMCONSUL GUANGZHOU 0678
RUEHIN/AIT TAIPEI 0570
RUEHHK/AMCONSUL HONG KONG 0806
RUEATRS/DEPT OF TREASURY WASHINGTON DC
RUCPDOC/DEPT OF COMMERCE WASHINGTON DC
RUEAUSA/DEPT OF HHS WASHINGTON DC
RHEHAAA/NSC WASHINGTON DC
RUEHGH/AMCONSUL SHANGHAI 6296

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 
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