The dancer, choreographer and culture manager Jin Xing lives and works in Shanghai, where she has been heading her own company, the Jin Xing Dance Theatre, since 2000. Owing to her unusual past, including the first sex change ever to have taken place with official sanction in China, she is now one of the best known creators of culture in a society which has keenly been sampling new values, life-styles and aesthetic forms of expression. Jin Xing was born in 1969 as the only son of a couple from Korea and was given her first training as a dancer while in the army, which at that time was the best teacher of dancing. She went through all stages of military training while also learning Russian ballet, classical Chinese dancing and acrobatics but suffered for having the soul of a woman in a man's body. In hierarchical and conservative China it took a lot of patience and renunciation to get her way.