Ai Xiaoming （1953—）, feminist scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker.
Ai received her Ph.D. in Modern Chinese Literature from the Beijing Normal University in 1987, making her the first female doctorate in literature in the post-Cultural Revolution era. She taught at the Department of Cultural Foundations of the China Youth University of Political Studies from 1988 to 1994, and the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Sun Yat-sen University from 1994 until retiring in 2013.
As a child whose parents were one of the “Five Black Categories”, Ai witnessed and experienced the brutality of the Cultural Revolution. Ai's grandfather, Tang Shengzhi, was a KMT army general, and her father, Ai Renkuan, was labeled a Rightist during the Cultural Revolution.
Then 13 years old, she was forced to denounce her parents and live apart from them. In 1984, still trying to fit into the system, she joined the Communist Party and the next year moved to Beijing to work on her PhD at Beijing Normal University. She taught at the China Youth University of Political Studies, which was under the Communist Youth League.
But during this period Ai befriended outsiders, such as the novelist Wang Xiaobo, becoming a close confidant. In 1988, she spent a year in Hong Kong working on the ideas of Milan Kundera and translated his work
The Art of the Novel.
The next year, she returned to Beijing but was unsure what to make of the Tiananmen protests. From her experiences in the Cultural Revolution, she was skeptical of amorphous movements but she delivered blankets to hunger strikers and defended the students’ right to free speech. She avoided being purged from the university but in 1994 she moved to the more relaxed atmosphere of southern China, taking a position at Zhongshan University, focusing on women’s issues.
A turning point came in 1999 when she spent an academic year at the University of the South in Tennessee. She put her on a self-guided study of documentary films, watching two to three films a day. She also noted the political engagement of many local academics.
She took back to China a copy of the
Vagina Monologues, which she translated into Chinese and had her students perform. In 2003, she founded the Sex/Gender Education Forum and asked her old friend, the famous documentary filmmaker Hu Jie (
see separate entry), to help her document the play’s staging in China. From his work she learned how to make documentary films and the two collaborated on several films, including
White Ribbon, The Epic of Central Plains and
Care and Love. That same year, she was inspired by the Sun Zhigang case to push for the abolition of the Custody and Repatriation system; she later intervened in the Huang Jing case, the Taishi Village case and other public events.
Her other films include
Taishi Village (following the famous events when villagers of Taishi, in suburban Guangzhou, where the government tried to remove the local officials in 2005),
Our Children (about the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake),
Three Days in Wukan (about Wukan villagers protests against the government’s seizure of their farmland in 2010), and
Jiabiangou Elegy (about the persecution of inmates at the Jiabiangou labor camp).
In January 2010, Ai and women rights lawyer Guo Jianmei were awarded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize, an international human rights award honoring women rights defenders. Due to her advocacy, Ai has faced various forms of repression but continues to fight to this day to document history.
For other resources, see
an interview with her on the New York Review of Books website and
a video interview on the University of Michigan website.
