Ai Xiaoming (Chinese: 艾晓明; born 1953) is a Chinese documentary filmmaker, feminist scholar and political activist.^[1] She is also a scholar of women's and public issues, and former professor at Sun Yat-sen University.^[2] Ai was born in Wuhan in 1953,^[3] and has spent most of her adult life in Beijing and Guangzhou.^[4]

Ai Xiaoming and Guo Jianmei won the 2010 Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom.^[5]

Ai Xiaoming was born in 1953 in the city of Wuhan with a name meaning 'bright dawn', a name typical of the period to show reverence to the new Party government.^[6] Her grandfather was Tang Shengzhi, a prominent Kuomintang general in the Second Sino-Japanese War and responsible for the defence of Nanjing.^[6] Despite his affiliation with the Kuomintang administration, the family was relatively privileged, and Ai's father worked as an English teacher.

At the age of twelve, as the Cultural Revolution swept through the country, Ai's family was caught up in the violence. Her grandfather was arrested and imprisoned - where he would later die at the age of 81. Ai's parents were both denounced for their relationship, beaten and sentenced to menial labour.^[6] Ai was pressured into denouncing her parents and eventually joined a local band of Red Guards to distance herself from her family.

In 1969, Ai Xiaoming was denied entry to high school because of her relation to 'counter-revolutionaries' and was instead sent to the rural countryside to practice vocational skills.^[6]

In 1974, as the party was beginning to launch broad rehabilitation campaigns, Ai was admitted to Central China Normal University in Wuhan based on her relation to former officials. At university she would heavily study literature. During this time she was forbidden from joining the Chinese Communist Party because of her past - but was eventually allowed membership in 1984, as the party opened up in the relatively liberal 1980s.^[6]

Upon graduation, Ai moved to Beijing to work on a PhD in Chinese Literature at Beijing Normal University and became the first woman to obtain a PhD in literature after the Cultural Revolution.

Despite an initial apathy, towards the end of the 1989 Tiananmen protests she visited and brought blankets for the protesters. Ai's political awakening was influenced by the massacre that followed.^[6]

Following this, she stopped pursuing a career at an institution as closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party's political structure as Beijing Normal University and accepted a job in the relatively liberal Guangzhou at Zhongshan University.

In the fall of 1999 and spring of 2000, she spent a sabbatical year teaching at The University of the South in Sewanee, TN. In her early career, Ai was an accomplished writer and translator, writing several books on literature and translating the works of Milan Kundera, as well as editing others.^[7]

Her experience in an American Liberal Arts college has had a major impact on her political activism. When she returned to China, for example, she translated The Vagina Monologues into Chinese and had her students perform it.^[6]

In 2003, Ai Xiaoming began to make documentary films after an encounter with the documentarian Hu Jie.^[8] Ai collaborated with Hu on her first film which documented her staging of the Vagina Monologues at her university. She explained in interviews that she wanted to use film to break through shame, expose injustice, promote social awareness and make visible things that are not normally spoken about.^[8][9]

In 2009, she was prevented from attending a Chinese Documentary Film Festival in Hong Kong, due to concerns about her personal safety resulting from her political film-making activities.^[10]

Ai has criticised the Chinese government's national policy of compulsory IUDs for women who have already given birth to a child. She has said that many women, herself included, had never been advised of potential complications and the requirement for regular checkups.^[11]

In 2013, Ai protested topless on Twitter^[12][13][14] and outside a Hainan school in response to the rape of six students by the school's principal and a local official. She was jailed the same day for defending herself with a kitchen knife against attackers who came to her home. She stated that her nude protest was inspired by Ai Weiwei.^[13][14]

Ai's films are banned in China.^[15]

Since 2004, she has made more than two dozen films, including documentaries about citizen activism, social problems, and corruption. Some of her films aim to uncover whitewashed historical events.^[1]

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (July 2018)

• Zeng, Jinyan. "The Politics of Emotion in Grassroots Feminist Protests: A Case Study of Xiaoming Ai's Nude Breasts Photography Protest Online." Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, vol. 15, no. 1, 2014, pp. 41–52. JSTOR. Accessed 26 Feb. 2021.
• Ai Xiaoming (translated by Yaxue Cao) (16 April 2013). "The Wrath of Vaginas: Face to Face with Masanjia Woman's Labor Camp". China Change. Yaxue Cao.
• Hung, Ruth Y.Y. ‘“An Honest Failure”: Simone de Beauvoir in China.’ In Failures East and West: Cultural Encounters between East Asia and Europe, eds. Ralf Hertel and Kirsten Sandrock. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 49–65.