Traditional Chinese culture is all about the straight man. Confucius pretty much decided they are the only people who matter to society. Western fashion managed to disrupt that culture. First there were the metrosexuals, and now surveys reveal that Chinese millennials in major cities are openly accepting LGBTQ lifestyles. Diversity seems to have successfully disrupted straight-man culture.

For a while, Jing Xing, a dancer, theatre director and the most famous trans person in China, ruled the airwaves. With her talk show and a number of other hit shows, including Venus Hits Mars and Chinese Dating, she led the ratings by bashing straight-man culture and encouraging women to stand up to bullying and sexual harassment. She was accompanied by a wave of young actors who took over Chinese screens with their feminine, skinny looks. They built up such fan bases on the Internet that the government and state media decided to cast them in political propaganda films in a desperate attempt to be relevant. This angered quite a few princelings – the ruling class descended from Communist party icons – who saw their revered forefathers portrayed by androgynous young men who represented the antithesis of Chinese machismo.

So the princelings fought back. In an attempt to return the straight man to his rightful place at the pinnacle of Chinese culture, they made a series of Chinese Rambo-style movies called Wolf Warrior (it worked: Wolf Warrior 2 is the highest grossing movie in Chinese history). They banned Jing Xing from television. They created an auto-delete mechanism to remove the word homosexual from social media. One Chinese TV director even went on air and accused women executives at television stations of promoting feminine-looking men because they were their toy boys. The backlash was real – and until recently, it definitely had me worried.

This summer, Tencent News, a division of media and technology conglomerate Tencent, created an online variety show called 1,068 Soul-Searching Questions, which was half survey and half group therapy. I was one of the guests. For the first hour of the live event, 20 guests in the studio answered survey questions, while a couple of million people watching the show took the same survey online. There was also a pre-recorded section featuring a group therapy session with the 20 guests, who were mostly young and from all walks of life. So what did these “soul-searching” questions reveal about the Chinese people?

Above all, we believe our parents did a horrible job raising us. So much so that 77% of people who took the survey during the first show agreed that anyone intending to have children should have to pass a nationally organized test. There is the generation gap; in fact, it’s more of a chasm than a gap!

The stories that people told were amazing: one insurance saleswoman said her parents had made her skip college and start working after high school so that she could pay for her brother to go to college. She had later also been forced to fund his wedding. She had finally cut off her parents three weeks before the show. Another woman who worked as a designated driver for drunks at night said she always preferred driving women or gay men because they never harassed her. All
straight men, she said, would try to grope her.

Secondly, 80% of all surveyed believe that Chinese straight men are guilty of bad taste. Even straight men themselves agreed. Among the guests, a man who owned a delivery service said: ‘I am straight, and I know I have horrible taste.’ He stood up and yelled in desperation for a queer eye: ‘Can someone gay please help me?’ A lawyer began defending straight men, saying that men should focus on making money and not frivolous things like clothes, before a tech entrepreneur corrected him: ‘Oh please, if I can look good when I am coding, you can look better when you are lawyering.’

It was just an online show, but I felt strangely relieved after my 1,068 Soul-Searching Questions experience. Despite all the official efforts to remove, suppress and generally knock diversity out of Chinese lives and culture, it felt like proof that hope remained. Maybe fashion still has the power to save the Chinese from the terrible fate of being led by Wolf Warrior straight men with bad taste, after all.