"Chengdu is very tolerant of gay people" is one of the most widely circulated city narratives on the Chinese internet. But a nationally comparable survey reaches the opposite conclusion: in the dimension of marriage and family, Chengdu men rank dead last in China in tolerance toward gay people. This essay does three things: state the buried conclusion plainly; dismantle every rhetorical device used to dissolve it; and draw the line that was never drawn between "a lot of creative output" and "a high degree of tolerance."
① Chengdu men rank last nationwide in tolerance toward gay people. In a nationally comparable survey (32 provinces, 83,250 valid responses), Chengdu men are singled out as "the population most unable to accept gay people in the country" — nearly 50% directly classify homosexuality as a "psychological perversion" (the highest rate nationwide), and 40% oppose same-sex marriage (the report says this rate is "far higher than any other region in China"). This cannot be dissolved by "sample bias": every province was measured with the same ruler.
② "A lot of creative output" ≠ "a high degree of tolerance." The only thing that is actually observable about Chengdu — or Russia — is the high output and consumption traffic of same-sex-themed fiction. High output does not prove high tolerance of queer narratives, let alone high acceptance of real queer people. The most damning example is in Russia: a Chinese danmei novel, Heaven Official's Blessing, outsold the Harry Potter series — in the very country where same-sex marriage support hovers around 7% and promotion of homosexuality is criminalized.
③ "Not supporting, not opposing" ≠ neutral. On the absolute scale of queer rights, "not supporting, not opposing" means "not supporting." There is a structural gap between relative neutrality and absolute neutrality.
Almost every rebuttal to "Chengdu is tolerant" eventually points at the same survey: the national dating-and-marriage survey published by Jiayuan (one of China's largest matchmaking platforms) with analysis by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Its conclusion on the "marriage and family" dimension is explicit and counter-intuitive — Chengdu men rank at the bottom of the country in acceptance of gay people. The gap between this finding and the popular narrative is the first key to the whole story.
First, dispel an illusion: "Chengdu is tolerant / Chengdu is the Gay Capital" is not a meme invented by the short-video era. It is a narrative that has been retold at every media transition since the Web 1.0 era:
This genealogy proves the opposite of what it seems: the fact that a claim has circulated for about twenty years and "feels like common sense" does not mean it has been tested. Precisely because it is old and catchy, it needs to be re-checked against comparable data. Its age is an advantage of spread, not of evidence.
The hard conclusion first, with no tables to hide behind. In a nationally comparable survey of 32 provinces and 83,250 valid responses, Chengdu men are explicitly named by the report as "the population most unable to accept gay people in the country." In concrete numbers: nearly half (≈50%) of Chengdu men consider homosexuality "a twisted psychological perversion" — the highest rate nationwide; simultaneously, 40% of Chengdu men explicitly oppose same-sex marriage, a rate the report describes as "far higher than any other region in China."
For scale: the national average male opposition to same-sex marriage is 35%, and national average male support is only 17%; the most accepting Shandong men reach 35.6% in accepting same-sex marriage, and the most accepting Nanjing women reach 61.4% in calling homosexuality "a normal emotional choice." In other words, while other places are still debating "support or not," nearly half of Chengdu men have already classified homosexuality as "psychological perversion" — a difference in the intensity of attitude, not merely in percentages.
To see why Chengdu is so striking, first lay out the national gender backdrop. In this fifth-wave survey (September 2015), men's opposition to same-sex marriage (35%) was almost double women's (18%); even on the softer question "how do you view homosexuality," male opposition (28%) was significantly higher than female (15%), while female support (27%) was nearly double male support (14%). The full national distribution follows:
Regionally, male support for same-sex marriage in the Southwest is clearly low (support ≈16%, opposition ≈33%), while men in Beijing, Henan, and Hebei lead the country; the most accepting Shandong men reach 35.6% in accepting same-sex marriage (national male support only 17%), and the most accepting Nanjing women reach 61.4% in calling homosexuality "a normal emotional choice."
Note this is not a vague "the Southwest runs low" but the report's named national bottom: on the two hardest, most family-adjacent dimensions — pathologization (nearly half call it a perversion) and opposition to same-sex marriage (40%, far above the 35% national male average) — Chengdu men are simultaneously last.
One counter-example to address preemptively: in the same report, Guangzhou men's opposition on the broader "view of homosexuality" question approaches 70%, appearing higher than Chengdu. This does not overturn Chengdu's last-place ranking — the two are measured on different questions: Guangzhou's high value appears on the broad "attitude toward the phenomenon" item, while Chengdu is explicitly ranked last on the harder "pathologization" and "same-sex marriage" items. The report's author attributes the Southwest's conservatism to "traditional customs and values being preserved relatively well." Depending on the question, the "most conservative" city has two names — Guangzhou and Chengdu — but Chengdu's last-place finish on the two hardest dimensions is written in black and white in the report.
Faced with "Chengdu men rank last," no serious person should accept it at face value; the proper response is to question it. The objection below is precisely the defense I myself originally made for Chengdu — I once believed it worked. So it deserves to be taken seriously and dismantled step by step:
"This survey was conducted by a dating platform. People who register on a dating platform and seriously fill out dating questionnaires are, by definition, more invested in traditional marriage and more conservative than the general population. So if Chengdu's opposition rate measures high in such a sample, isn't that just inflation from a conservative sample? How can it prove that Chengdu people are actually intolerant?"
To be frank, this is the logic I initially used to "excuse" Chengdu. It is very intuitive. But being intuitive is not the same as being valid — see the dismantling below.
Step one (A-1) · honestly concede the half that is right
The rebuttal is not wholly wrong; half of it is correct: dating-platform users are indeed, on average, more traditional and more conservative than the whole population, so the survey's "absolute values" are systematically inflated. If anyone uses one of these percentages to assert "how many people in all of China are homophobic," that would indeed be distorted — that half, I fully accept.
Step two (A-2) · but it smuggles in a change of subject: we never compared absolute values, only relative rankings
The real point is this: in this survey, all provinces' samples come from the same dating platform, the same sampling and statistical methodology. In other words, the "conservative filter" is not applied only to Chengdu — it is applied equally, uniformly to every province in the country. No province is exempt.
Run the simplest thought experiment: suppose "dating platforms are conservative" raises every province's opposition rate by an equal 10 percentage points —
Chengdu men go from 40% to 50%; the most accepting province, say, goes from 10% to 20%. Everyone is given the exact same +10 points, so who ranks first and who ranks last does not change by a single place. Chengdu is still at the bottom, and its gap from other provinces has not shrunk at all.
This is the heart of the matter: "dating platforms are conservative" is a constant shared by all provinces; and a constant that applies equally to everyone cannot, in logic, explain the difference of "why Chengdu specifically is last." You cannot use one identical ruler to prove that the shortest person it measured is actually not short.
Separating these two things makes everything clear: "absolute values" answer "how conservative is this society overall," they are indeed inflated by the dating-platform sample, and they should be quoted with care; "relative rankings" answer "where does Chengdu rank within a national, uniform standard," and they are unaffected by the shared filter. This essay argues Chengdu is last using the latter, from start to finish.
So "the sample is conservative" not only fails to rescue Chengdu — precisely because it applies equally to all provinces, Chengdu's last-place finish under one common methodology can only be genuinely last. This is why I retracted my own original defense.
It does not prove the crude claim "Chengdu is homophobic." It proves a more precise, harder-to-rebut conclusion:
To overturn the Chengdu data, there is a second argument that sounds equally reasonable. State it fully as a question first:
"Opposing same-sex marriage does not mean I'm not tolerant of gay people. I simply don't endorse the institution of 'marriage' — in daily life I can treat them perfectly equally. So how can a low marriage-support rate possibly imply low overall tolerance?"
Applied to a single individual, this claim is not wholly unreasonable; such individuals genuinely exist. But once it is used to defend a region, it smuggles an extremely rare case into the position of a universal rule. To answer it, we cannot rely on anecdotes — we must look at what the statistical regularities at the group level actually look like.
Cross-national data paint a clear and consistent picture: a society's same-sex marriage support rate and its overall social acceptance (neighborly acceptance, employment fairness, public tolerance) are highly aligned. Western and Northern Europe, where marriage support exceeds 70%, are simultaneously the regions with the world's highest queer acceptance; while the former Soviet space and sub-Saharan Africa, where marriage support is under 10%, sit at the global bottom in overall acceptance. It is nearly impossible to find a region combining "global-bottom marriage support" with "global-leading overall acceptance."
The Williams Institute's May 2024 report, Positive Attitudes Toward LGBTQ People in China (nearly 3,000 valid responses), gives the precise distribution across dimensions:
| Attitude dimension | Agree | Note |
|---|---|---|
| LGBTQ students should be protected from campus bullying | 68% | protective dimension, highest |
| Workplaces should treat LGBTQ employees fairly | 62% | anti-discrimination dimension |
| Society should accept LGBTQ people | 53% | overall acceptance |
| Support same-sex marriage | 52% | institutional-rights dimension |
| Would attend a same-sex wedding | 46% | personal participation |
| Would not mind an LGBTQ neighbor | 46% | neighborly acceptance (another 39% "somewhat not mind") |
| Would not mind seeing LGBTQ content in media | 45% | public-visibility dimension, among the lowest |
Note two features of these numbers: first, there are indeed gaps between dimensions — "protect students" (68%) outranks "marriage" (52%) — meaning attitudes are layered, not monolithic; second, all dimensions fluctuate in the same direction; no dimension shows the divergence of "marriage support collapsing while everything else soars." The gaps explain "hierarchy," not "reversal of direction."
Low marriage support → low overall tolerance is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the valid default inference. Chinese society does contain a group that "does not support same-sex marriage but does not interfere with private life," which constitutes a "moderate layer" in attitude stratification; but it only lifts overall acceptance from "extreme rejection" to "limited tolerance," it cannot flip a person's attitude from "conservative" to "open."
Therefore, the default inference of "Chengdu ranks last on the marriage dimension" is that Chengdu's overall tolerance sits in the national middle-to-bottom tier — not that "Chengdu is actually very tolerant." Unless extreme counter-evidence appears, there is no reason to assume Chengdu is the exception outside the 99%.
China's first LGBT social environment survey (2014) and CGSS data together outline the country's "date-pit" distribution: about two-tenths fully accepting, about three-tenths explicitly rejecting, and about five-tenths in the middle — "do not interfere, but do not actively support." The World Values Survey shows that only 7% of Chinese consider homosexuality "fully justifiable," yet 53% believe society should accept LGBTQ people — moral judgment in the negative and rights-level tolerance coexist in parallel among the Chinese public.
This structure matters enormously: it shows the real attitude of the "middle group" is "morally unapproving, behaviorally non-interfering, institutionally unsupporting." It is not genuine tolerance — it is non-action. Packaging this "non-action" as "tolerance" is precisely the most hidden substitution in the "Chengdu narrative."
Sexuality-studies pioneer Li Yinhe's 2007 telephone survey of large and medium cities across China provides the most complete, classic dataset on "dimensional separation." It simultaneously shows how divergent public attitudes can be across different dimensions:
| Survey dimension | Data | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Gay people should enjoy employment opportunities equal to heterosexuals | 91% in favor | abstract civic-rights cognition — very high (US was 86% at the time) |
| Gay and straight people are equal as persons | ≈80% | abstract value judgment — high |
| Should gay-themed film/TV be allowed to air publicly in China | ≈55% for / 40%+ against | public-visibility dimension — evenly split, deeply divided |
| "How do you view homosexual behavior" (another survey) | 20.8% "no problem at all" / 37.8% "completely wrong" | moral-evaluation dimension — negative verdicts hold the majority |
This set of data exposes what is hidden by the sentence "Li Yinhe: the Chinese public is more tolerant than the West": the "high acceptance" of the Chinese public is concentrated in "abstract, non-self-involving" cognition of rights and personhood (because it demands no behavioral change and touches no one's life), and once the question descends to "moral evaluation" (is homosexuality wrong at all) or "public visibility" (can it be seen on screen), attitudes immediately divide or even reverse.
This is the most authoritative example of "dimensional separation" — it proves that "high acceptance on one abstract dimension" can never be extrapolated to "tolerance on all dimensions." Back to Chengdu: the folk impression of "openness" corresponds to the 91% "employment rights" layer of Li Yinhe's data (abstract, unrelated to self, no real contact); the dating survey measures the 37.8% "completely wrong" layer (closest to the deepest recesses of family and moral order). Both datasets are simultaneously true, but they are simply not about the same thing.
It must first be admitted: "Chengdu's subculture is very open" is itself a vague, even misleading formulation. If the umbrella of "subculture" also shelters same-sex content, and it is then called "highly tolerant," while same-sex marriage support ranks last nationwide — that is logically incoherent. The only way out is to disaggregate the concept of "subculture" and verify each proposition separately.
At this point, someone will surely bring out the most intuitive counter-evidence. Put that question on the table first:
"You say Chengdu men rank last, yet Chengdu's gay bars, anime/comic conventions, danmei fanfiction, and web novels are countless, and young people talk about male-male romance without any hesitation — that is visible, tangible openness. Isn't such a thriving subculture exactly the ironclad proof of high tolerance?"
The problem with this rebuttal is that the word "subculture" is too broad — it bundles several things with entirely different subjects into one. To answer it, the first step is not to argue, but to disaggregate the vague word.
"Subculture" is not a single measurable object. It can be split into at least three propositions with mutually independent subjects. And a hard rule must first be established: "a lot of creative output" ≠ "a high tolerance of creative content" ≠ "a high acceptance of real people" — the former is a fact of output and traffic; the latter two are judgments of social attitude. They cannot be conflated.
Nothing demonstrates "more output ≠ higher tolerance" better than Russia, not Chengdu. Russian Book Union sales data show that the Chinese danmei novel Heaven Official's Blessing, in its first three volumes, topped Russia's fiction sales chart for two consecutive years, with total sales surpassing J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series; in the first half of 2024 it reached the top of Russia's overall bestseller list with 92 million rubles (about 7.56 million RMB) in revenue — the second-place title (34.3 million rubles) earned less than half as much. The first three volumes alone sold over 500,000 copies — astonishing for the Russian book market.
And all this happens in a country where national support for same-sex marriage is about 7%, promotion of homosexuality is restricted by explicit legislation, and the Supreme Court has designated the "international LGBT movement" an extremist organization. The same Russia: buying danmei novels until they sell out, while imposing comprehensive restrictions on real gay people. Market scale and rights situation can move in completely opposite directions, with no connection at all.
The lesson for Chengdu is right here: if "danmei sells out" counts as evidence of "high tolerance," then we must accept that Russia is one of the most gay-tolerant countries on Earth — an absurd conclusion nobody would accept. Yet in the case of Chengdu, many people are repeating exactly that absurd inference.
Point one: (a)'s "high" is a high of output and traffic; it only shows that this kind of content is produced in quantity and consumed — it says nothing at all about how tolerant society is of queer narratives, just as the Russian example above shows: the hotter a country's danmei sales, the more unrelated it can be to its degree of restriction on real gay people.
Point two: the subjects of (b) and (c) are "public attitude"; the subject of (a) is "market output." Turning (a)'s "high output" into (b)'s or (c)'s "high tolerance" is substituting "how much was produced" for "how much was accepted" — the most hidden, most exploited conceptual substitution in the entire argument.
Concerning the relation between "subcultural tolerance" and "tolerance of gay people," logic permits only three possibilities:
If "subculture" strictly refers to entertainment subcultures unrelated to homosexuality (hip-hop, street culture, anime, etc.), then "high subcultural tolerance" and "low tolerance of gay people" can coexist without contradiction. But this is tantamount to admitting: this "highly tolerant" subculture has nothing to do with the gay issue and can provide no evidence for "Chengdu is gay-friendly." It merely changes the subject.
If "subculture" includes same-sex content (danmei, gay community), then by the rule of Chapter II, "high gay-related tolerance" should imply "high overall tolerance of gay people" — but this is directly falsified by the dating survey: Chengdu men rank last on the same-sex marriage dimension. Option B fails.
The only remaining path, and the one the evidence supports: low real-life tolerance of gay people and the boom of danmei fantasy consumption are not merely compatible — they can be mutually causal: the more the real space is compressed, the more emotion and desire must relocate into fictional texts. Chengdu can perfectly well be simultaneously "a national highland of danmei consumption" and "a national bottom tier of real gay acceptance," because the subject of the former is the public consuming fictional male-male romance, and the subject of the latter is real gay people — they are simply not the same population, not the same thing.
This rupture has ample research support:
The boom of danmei consumption and real-world suppression are not a coincidental coexistence; they are causal. The mechanism: when the real public space for gay people is systematically closed, desire and imagination about same-sex love can only relocate into fictional texts.
Russia is the cleanest control group for this mechanism. Heaven Official's Blessing has topped Russia's fiction sales chart for two consecutive years, with total sales surpassing the Harry Potter series, and in the first half of 2024 topped Russia's overall bestseller chart again with 92 million rubles (≈7.56 million RMB) — and this is the same country that criminalized the promotion of homosexuality, designated international LGBT organizations as extremists, and rendered gay people completely invisible in public space. The less reality has an outlet, the more fiction grows wildly. Russia proved with an entire bestseller market that danmei selling out is not the product of tolerance, but the product of suppression.
This mechanism has direct evidence: the 2026 Sage-journal article on Chinese BL erotica, Pure Love and Shadow Desire, explicitly argues the symbiosis of censorship and BL prosperity — the stricter the censorship, the more creation must exist under disguises such as "pure love" and "fated bonds," and the more readers' desire is amplified precisely in that "forbidden shadow." One detail: in 2014 Jinjiang renamed its "danmei" section "pure love" precisely to survive censorship; and it was in this game of censorship and disguise that the danmei literature market surpassed 10 billion RMB, growing over 15% annually.
The boom of danmei culture is not evidence that "society tolerates gay people" — it is often a symptom that "the real space for gay people has been compressed." The more public presentation is banned, the more fantasy thrives — this is the compensation of suppression, not the proof of acceptance. To cite it as "tolerance" is to mistake a starving patient's appetite for good nutrition.
Therefore, the correct formulation is not "Chengdu's subculture is tolerant, just conservative on marriage," but: the only thing observable about Chengdu is "the high output and consumption traffic of same-sex-themed fiction" — a commodified fictional-text production phenomenon whose main subjects are straight women, which constitutes neither evidence of tolerance for queer narratives nor acceptance of the identity and life of real gay people. To call it "tolerance" in one umbrella word is to mistake "how many male-male love stories were produced" for "how many gay men were accepted"; to mistake traffic for goodwill.
This chapter's conclusion is no isolated observation; it fits perfectly with two mature social theories, which corroborate each other.
Laura Mulvey's "male gaze" theory holds that in traditional cinema, women are the objects being looked at. BL research (Pagliassotti, 2012) finds that danmei constitutes a "female gaze" cultural space: women can watch and imagine male bodies and emotions, reversing from "the looked-at" to "the looker", without being looked back at, and without entering a heterosexual power relation.
This theory directly exposes the function of danmei consumption: it serves the viewing needs and emotional compensation of straight women, and has nothing to do with the real situation of gay men. It is a reversal of the viewing structure, not a reversal of the power structure.
Lisa Duggan (2002) proposed "homonormativity": a politics that does not challenge the dominant heterosexual norm but maintains its institutions; Jasbir Puar's (2007) "homonationalism" reveals how gay identity is conscripted as a political and market tool. "Rainbow capitalism" goes further: it commodifies queer identity into consumable signs, stripping away its political and existential meaning.
Applied to China: the danmei market is the archetypal sample of commodifying, aestheticizing, and de-politicizing "male-male love" — consuming the symbolized romance while avoiding the survival problems of real gay men. The 2026 Sage article even argues that this "corporate/market-sponsored visibility" precisely depoliticizes queer struggle.
Placing the two theories side by side, the conclusion is self-evident: Chengdu's danmei boom = the local version of female gaze + rainbow capitalism. It consumes "male-male love symbols" stripped of real-world reference, so it is not merely unrelated to "acceptance of real gay people" — it can be its opposite: the more same-sex love is purified into a consumer product, the more it evades the seriousness of the real population's situation.
To understand the real situation of Chinese sexual minorities, looking only at "whether films are banned" is far from enough. Two kinds of "neutrality" are constantly conflated here — the state's "neutrality" and the people's (middle-ground) "neutrality". The former is a framework defined officially; the latter is an attitude shaped by that framework. Once the two are separated, the causal chain becomes visible.
"State neutrality" and "popular neutrality" sound like the same thing, but they are two levels moving in opposite directions:
| The state's "neutrality" | The middle ground's "neutrality" | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An official procedural stance: "not support, not oppose, not advocate," constituted by a series of concrete actions (censorship, no approval of public events, no marriage institution, no anti-discrimination legislation) | The daily attitude of the middle group, roughly half the population: "don't interfere with others, but don't actively support either" |
| Who defines | The definer (independent variable) — officialdom decides "which frame this matter belongs in" | The receiver (dependent variable) — its judgment relies heavily on the frame signals given by officialdom |
| How it forms | Active choice: naming the restriction of queer public visibility "content governance / maintaining order / protecting minors" | Passive anchoring: under high trust, accepting this naming, and therefore experiencing the same restriction as "neutral routine management" |
| Substance | Procedurally "no stance," result-wise maintaining the status quo of existing norms — a constructed neutrality | Morally "unapproving," behaviorally "non-interfering," institutionally "unsupporting" — a transmitted neutrality |
Many people assume "public attitude" forms independently, and the state merely reflects public opinion. But in this matter the direction is reversed: the state first defines "how to see it," and the high-trust middle ground then forms "how I see it." The state frames restricting gay film as "governance," and the middle ground experiences it as "neutral"; if officialdom changed the frame, the middle ground's attitude would shift with it. The position of that half of the population is, in essence, anchored by the official frame.
Chapter II already sketched the "date-pit" structure of Chinese public attitudes: about two-tenths fully accepting, about three-tenths explicitly rejecting, and about five-tenths as a middle ground of "non-interference but no active support." Small at both ends, large in the middle — what truly decides the situation of sexual minorities is this roughly five-tenths of the middle with no fixed stance.
And why do these five-tenths have no fixed stance? Because they hand the "power to define" to the authority they trust most. The Edelman Trust Barometer shows trust in the Chinese government reached 90% in 2020, ranking first among major economies for three consecutive years, with a composite trust index of 79 in 2024 (the US was 46). Such high trust means: most state policy actions carry an "innate presumption of legitimacy" in the eyes of the middle ground.
The state's attitude toward gay-themed film (censorship / delisting / no projects)
↓ Officialdom names it "content governance, maintaining order," not "a group-rights issue"
The high-trust middle ground accepts this naming
↓
The middle ground concludes: "this is only neutral routine management, not targeting anyone"
↓
The public visibility of sexual minorities is continuously reduced, without a single step being recognized by the middle ground as "not neutral"
Whatever attitude the state holds toward gay-themed film, the middle ground's attitude toward gay people will roughly follow — this is not coincidence; it is the result of transmission. The same restriction is, on the equality scale, a systematic reduction of public visibility and equal rights (see 4.3), while in the eyes of the date-pit middle ground it is merely "neutral." The gap between the two verdicts is produced precisely here.
Take "the state bans gay-themed film and TV and restricts related public content" — the concrete example repeatedly raised in discussion. The verdict on this act depends entirely on which reference frame you stand in:
"Neutrality" is always a relative concept; the key is the reference frame. "Not supporting, not opposing" viewed within China's internal frame is indeed "neutral" — because mainstream opinion likewise considers public dissemination of same-sex relationships inappropriate, and the state's restriction follows naturally.
But on the absolute scale of queer rights, "not supporting, not opposing" effectively equals "not supporting": no marriage institution, no anti-discrimination law, systematically restricted public visibility, uncorrected popular prejudice. While the state's actions are read by the middle ground as "neutral," their objective effect is continuous suppression of the public rights of sexual minorities.
So the "Chengdu is tolerant" narrative and the official "not supporting, not opposing" narrative share the same mechanism: both are judged "neutral" or "moderate" within a relative frame, while showing "restriction" and "non-support" within an absolute frame. Mistaking relative neutrality for absolute neutrality is the most hidden layer of self-comfort.
Because the middle ground does not believe they are "homophobic" — they genuinely believe they are merely "neutral." This self-perception means:
"The middle ground genuinely believes it is neutral" — this psychological phenomenon is no accident; it has solid explanations in philosophy and sociology. Four classic concepts can state it completely:
Antonio Gramsci argued that domination is maintained not by force but by "consent" — the values of the dominant class are internalized as society's "common sense," so the dominated "voluntarily" identify with them. The middle ground's matter-of-fact attitude toward "restricting the public presentation of homosexuality" is precisely the result of this naturalization: it is no longer perceived as oppression, but as the normal "what everyone thinks."
Louis Althusser proposed that ideology "interpellates" individuals into subjects — when you answer "this is normal governance," you have already been interpellated into the frame that treats restriction as neutral. Every self-confirmation of "I don't see what's wrong" is a self-shaping.
Leon Festinger's theory explains why the middle ground insists "I am not homophobic": if they admitted "the institutions I support restrict gay people," it would clash with the self-image of "I am a tolerant, neutral person." To eliminate the dissonance, the least-effort path is actively reinterpreting the restriction as "maintaining order" or "protecting minors" — not that they failed to see the restriction, but that they immediately translated it into a harmless version.
In political philosophy, Rawlsian "neutrality" means the state does not favor among conceptions of the good. But strictly speaking, procedural non-favoritism ≠ neutral outcomes: a "not supporting, not opposing" institution, because the existing default structure is the heterosexual norm, will necessarily skew toward maintaining the status quo in its actual operation — this itself is a substantive non-neutrality, merely one that shifts the cost of non-neutrality onto the minority.
Four concepts point to the same conclusion: "neutrality" is not a discovered fact, but a constructed self-perception. It is shaped by cultural hegemony, maintained by ideological interpellation, protected by cognitive dissonance, and becomes substantive non-neutrality under the cover of procedure. Understood this way, the gap between "relative neutrality" and "absolute neutrality" is no longer a rhetorical matter but a mechanism.
Placing Chengdu in a global coordinate system reveals a more interesting structure: different countries' "homophobia" takes completely different institutional forms, but "homophobia" itself is highly convergent worldwide — cultural relativism cannot excuse any form of it.
| Dimension | Russia | China |
|---|---|---|
| National support for same-sex marriage | ≈7% (2019) | ≈40% (2014 urban) |
| Legal status | All-age ban on promoting "non-traditional sexual relations"; LGBT movement designated an extremist organization by the Supreme Court | No criminal statute targeting identity itself; systematic restrictions at the level of public dissemination |
| Target of control | Identity, organizations, public expression | Publicly disseminated content and works |
| Asylum channel | Exists (Russian sexual minorities can apply for political asylum in some countries) | Virtually nonexistent |
| Gender baseline | Overall extremely conservative; women slightly milder | Overall mid-low tier; women significantly more open |
The common ground of the two countries: the private sphere may exist, the public sphere must be invisible; fantasy works may flourish in niche circles, but cannot enter the mainstream. The difference is that Russia enforces through explicit law and organizational designation, while China enforces through content control and default convention. But regarding the outcome — "the public visibility of sexual minorities is systematically lowered" — the two are highly consistent.
Some Western leftists excuse restrictions in Chinese society with "this is East Asia's unique culture, not homophobia," and some selectively cherry-pick "Chengdu already proves China's tolerance." But this cultural relativism has two fatal flaws:
The international attention paid to queer situations is never a purely humanitarian allocation; it is doubly distorted by racial aesthetics and political narrative:
Russia belongs to the white racial category, and its queer situation is packaged as "the suffering tragic white person" — with both a political "anti-authoritarian resistance" narrative bonus and a position at the center of Western gay aesthetics. It therefore receives far more empathy and "pity-laced attention" than its numbers warrant.
China (and East Asia) sits at the other extreme: it is merely a "distant political Other," its queer situation used as a tool for institutional argument, yet it barely enters anyone's desire or aesthetic radius. Asian women still have a layer of "exotic softness" stereotype to be consumed; Asian men are long marginalized in the global aesthetic system — possessing neither the orthodoxy of whiteness nor the "exotic sexuality" labels of Latin and Middle Eastern men.
Result: the suffering of Russian queers is aestheticized into charm, the suffering of Chinese queers is politicized into news. The priority of equality discourse always yields to the priority of aesthetics and desire.
This also explains the psychological mechanism of "hearing only half": people need a symbolized utopia to house their expectations — Western gay men imagine Russia as a tragic beauty, Chinese netizens imagine Chengdu as a gay paradise. Neither is the truth; both are emotional outlets required by each narrative. The genuinely struggling group is simultaneously aestheticized for consumption, politicized for use, or selectively forgotten.
The "asymmetry of empathy" in 5.3 has mature critical-theory anchors as well.
Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism argues that the West constructs "the Orient" through a whole apparatus of "Orientalist" discourse as a heterogeneous, stagnant Other that can be described and consumed. Projected onto queer issues: China's queer situation is "Orientalized" into "a unique cultural phenomenon" rather than "a universal human-rights issue" — precisely the intellectual root of cultural relativism excusing homophobia. The same restriction is "authoritarian oppression of freedom" when it happens in Russia (worthy of anger), and "the particularity of Eastern culture" when it happens in China (worthy of understanding). The same act receives a completely different moral weight depending on the object's position in the Orientalist coordinate system.
Whiteness studies reveal that white is not merely a skin color but a set of unmarked norms — white suffering is naturally seen as "human suffering," while Asian suffering always needs extra explanation to be seen. Because Russian queer suffering falls within the "white tragic" frame, it automatically receives universal empathy; Asian queer suffering must always first be translated, argued for, and proven "worthy of attention." Empathy is not distributed by need; it is distributed according to a racialized order of desire.
Placing Orientalism and the white gaze side by side gives 5.3's phenomenon a theoretical foundation: the "white-tragic filter" exists because whiteness itself is the default universal standard; "China's situation receives no empathy" exists because Orientalism pre-positions China as an Other to be understood rather than empathized with. Together they constitute the underlying algorithm of "empathy allocation" in the international arena.
If "Chengdu is tolerant" were only a folk narrative inside China, it would at worst be a beautiful misunderstanding. But it is not — the narrative has been exported, processed, and upgraded into an international narrative: Chengdu is repeatedly manufactured as "China's most open gay city," "Gaydu," and China is thereby cast as a "leftist utopia." This chapter asks a sharper question: given that tolerance data place Chengdu near the national bottom (Chapter I), and that creative prosperity is merely compensation for repression (Chapter III), why does the English-language internet — dominated by Western media and travel platforms — still, and so eagerly, manufacture Chengdu/China as a utopia? The answer lies not in Chengdu, but in the needs of the image-makers.
First, one thing must be clear: "Gay Capital" was not invented by Western media or the English-language internet — it is a homegrown meme that has circulated for about two decades in China (full genealogy in Chapter I). What the English-language internet did was the second step: upgrading it from a "folk meme inside China" into an international verdict about "China's queer utopia." Three channels did the work:
Note the commonality of these three channels: they cite almost exclusively the spatial narratives of bars, nightclubs, and NGOs — none of them cites a single national attitude survey. In other words, the English-language internet's evidence that "Chengdu is open" and the data that "Chengdu ranks last" come from entirely different levels of evidence — the spectacle of consumption venues versus nationwide same-ruler measurement.
What is even more glaring is that the utopia narrative itself knows the truth. The well-known gay travel site Utopia-asia writes on its own Chengdu page: "Many Chinese gays say Chengdu is a gay heaven. But don't expect to see rainbow flags or pride parades. What it means is that gays in Chengdu feel tolerated, integrated to the point of near invisibility — in fact they are almost invisible." "Almost invisible" — the author of the utopian narrative wrote this sentence on the promotional page himself; most re-transmitters simply choose not to quote it.
When Western media and English-language platforms re-translated Chengdu, they performed three operations, repeated over and over: amplification, cropping, and sealing.
Amplification: magnify "relatively relaxed nightlife" into "the city is the most open"; cropping: delete from the narrative the same-ruler data of Chapter I (Chengdu men: 40% oppose same-sex marriage, nearly half label homosexuality "a psychological perversion," national bottom); sealing: erase from the story's timeline the fact that ChengduPride ran from 2008 to 2018 and then shut down amid nationwide tightening.
Thus a multi-faceted Chengdu — "relaxed nightlife + bottom-tier marriage attitudes + tightening space + discontinued pride" — is flattened into one sentence: "China's most open gay city." This is not a misunderstanding; it is cropping. What is cropped out is precisely the institutional and attitudinal data that decide the real situation of sexual minorities; what is kept is precisely the most consumable, most spectacular nightlife.
If the Chengdu utopia only served tourism, it would not deserve its own chapter. What really matters is its next link: Chengdu's "queer utopia" provides evidence for "China = progress," and "China = leftist utopia" in turn lends an aura of tolerance to Chengdu. The two narratives prop each other up, and their common root is the Western left's utopianization of China — not a recent invention but a tradition spanning nearly a century.
The 1950s: French left-wing intellectuals treated the new China as a "political utopia to be pilgrimaged." Chinese scholarship (journal Exploration and Free Views) puts it precisely: "It is less about praising a progressive utopia epitomized by China than about satisfying the political expectations of French society" — what they borrowed from China was a set of slogans to drive their own social reform, with no real understanding of China's political reality.
The structure of imagology: cross-cultural imagology (China-image studies) holds that Western images of China have always had two opposite archetypes — "idealization" and "demonization." The "idealized" China functions as a utopian reference point that the West uses to critique and transcend its own society. In other words, the utopianized China has never been about China; it is about the West's own anxieties and expectations.
The contemporary version · "Chinamaxxing": in March 2026, the English-language leftist magazine Jacobin published an article praising "Chinamaxxing" (one-sided infatuation with Chinese things), and was sharply criticized by the Asian-American leftist outlet New Bloom. New Bloom's critique hit the nail on the head: "This is not the West deciding to endorse China's economic governance model; it is the West deciding to criticize its own inequality by imitating an imagined China" — a "pantomime" of China, not an identification with China.
Peel this layer open and the answer is clear: what the Western left needs is not "the real China" but "the imagined China" — a symbolic weapon for fighting the West's own internal battles. In this symbolic system, Chengdu's gay nightlife is the most convenient piece of the puzzle: it both proves "China is progressive" (to slap the right) and proves "China is not so bad" (to slap alleged homophobia alarmists). The real situation of Chinese gay people — bottom-tier marriage attitudes, tightening space, pathologization — is precisely what this symbolic system must delete, because it would ruin the utopia's utility.
Place the "queer utopia (Chengdu)" and the "leftist utopia (China)" side by side, and a near-perfect circular argument emerges:
The left needs evidence for "China = progress"
↓ it takes Chengdu's gay nightlife as proof
Chengdu is manufactured as a "queer utopia"
↓ which in turn "proves" China = progressive, = tolerant
China's institutional restrictions thus appear "not so bad"
↓ and "not so bad" makes the Chengdu utopia seem credible
The loop closes, and the real situation is excluded from the loop
Key point: every link of this loop is indifferent to "the real situation of Chinese sexual minorities." The left consuming "progressive China" does not need Chengdu's marriage data; Gaydu travel guides consuming "open Chengdu" do not need institutional analysis; and China's sexual minorities exist in neither the left's symbols nor the tourism lens — they vanish between the two narratives.
The cruelest thing about the utopian narrative is that it can coexist with reality while remaining almost completely disconnected from it. Below is a recent public record — all verifiable facts, not positions — existing in the same country and the same time period as the "queer utopia" label:
| Date | Event | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 2017-06 | The Regulations for the Content Review of Online Audiovisual Programs explicitly placed "homosexuality" under "non-normal sexual relations/behaviors," alongside "incest, sexual perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse, and sexual violence" | At the level of official text, homosexuality is listed with sexual perversion — the public source of "lumping male-male behavior with pornographic content" |
| 2021-09 | The National Radio and Television Administration ordered a nationwide halt to "danmei-adaptation dramas" (BL-themed TV adaptations) | Creative prosperity does not mean permission; the market was shut down wholesale |
| 2022 | The Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) animation was taken down — the very work the previous chapter noted was "waiting out the storm" | Even the hottest works are not exempt |
| 2025-09 | The Australian horror film Together (Tomato-meter 90%) had its mainland-China version use AI to swap one man in a same-sex wedding scene into a woman (a heterosexual wedding), plus 6 minutes of cuts; international distributor NEON publicly condemned the "unauthorized alterations" and halted release in mainland China; the film was pulled the day before its premiere | Censorship escalated from "deletion" to "AI-falsifying facts" — even the image itself is no longer trustworthy |
| 2025-11 | Apple removed the gay dating apps Blued and Finka from the China App Store at regulators' request | Even the private social tools of sexual minorities are being purged |
| 2026-07 | China's state "Qinglang" (Clear-and-Healthy) campaign against chaotic live-streaming show groups named "deliberate shipping of fake couples (CP), scripted male-male fanservice (maifu)" as a core target | "Fanservice" is being swept away as chaos |
This 2025 film pushed "censorship escalation" to its extreme: instead of deleting the gay scenes, the distributor used generative AI to turn one member of the same-sex couple into a "woman," forcibly turning a same-sex wedding into a heterosexual one. Global media (The Independent, The Daily Beast, GCN, etc.) all covered it; its absurdity is that — the film itself is a body-horror story about "a mysterious force forcibly fusing two individuals into one," and the censor did exactly that: using the hand of power to erase a relationship. Even the horror inside a fiction became a prophecy of the censorship outside it. And underneath lies a deeper chill: if AI face-swapping can become a routine censorship tool, audiences will no longer be able to confirm whether the images they see have been altered — censorship has escalated from "deleting" to "rewriting history."
Place the 6.5 list and the 6.1–6.4 utopian narrative side by side, and the conclusion is unavoidable: at the same time that homosexuality is being swept away as a "non-normal sexual relation," same-sex weddings are being rewritten with AI, and gay dating apps are being removed in China — internationally, Chengdu is being manufactured as a "queer utopia" and China as a "beacon of progress." These two things must be seen together, or neither is visible.
At this point, I will stop using neutral words like "filter" or "bias." Let me be direct: this narrative of "Chengdu = queer utopia / China = leftist utopia" is not the West's well-intentioned misreading, nor an innocent accident of storytelling inside China — it is a structural collusion, completed by multiple parties, whose function is to conceal the real situation.
The Western left: your "Chinamaxxing," your utopianization of China, consumes a "symbolic China" and harms the sexual minorities of the "real China." You translate China's institutional restrictions into "Eastern particularity" and amplify Chengdu's nightlife into a "queer utopia" — this is not helping China's gay people; it is using their suffering as ammunition for your own ideological war. Your "politicization without empathy" toward China's queers and your "aestheticization with empathy" toward Russia are two sides of the same coin.
The Gaydu tourism and media industry: you package the living spaces of a minority — bars struggling to survive amid tightening, communities surviving after the pride shutdown — as the consumer spectacle of "the most open gay city." Facing the truth of "almost invisible," you chose to quote the "heaven" line. This is consumption of queer suffering, not witness.
China's own systematic suppression: while listing homosexuality alongside incest and sexual perversion in the review regulations, it comfortably enjoys the respectability that the Western "queer utopia" narrative brings — the Western flattery conveniently provides "legitimacy" for suppression inside China: it makes suppression seem "not so bad," and makes the real situation even less visible. The utopian narrative and the censorship machine are, in effect, accomplices.
So the fact that "the English-language internet manufactured Chengdu as a queer utopia" deserves anger not only for its distortion but for its function: it deprives the real situation of the chance to be seen, while dressing the suppression system in a glamorous coat. The purpose of this chapter is to unpick the seams of that coat, one by one, and let what it covers re-emerge — that is what we should actually be discussing.
Back to the original question: "Is Chengdu really tolerant?" — the answer depends on which Chengdu you mean.
If you mean the Chengdu of nightlife, the Chengdu of danmei fantasy consumption, the Chengdu of young people's entertainment scenes — yes, it is relatively permissive, and this is real and worth cherishing.
If you mean the Chengdu of marriage values, the Chengdu of mainstream gender order, the Chengdu of acceptance of real gay people — its conservatism sits in the national bottom tier. This too is real.
Two Chengdus exist simultaneously, without contradiction. What is genuinely wrong is substituting the overall impression of the first Chengdu for the overall conclusion about the second — using "the freedom to consume male-male love stories" to masquerade as "the sincerity of accepting real gay people," using the liveliness of a niche to cover the silence of institutions, using "non-interference" to masquerade as "acceptance," using relative neutrality to masquerade as absolute neutrality.
The purpose of this deconstruction is not to assert that a city "is homophobic," but to establish a methodology: before discussing any "tolerance," first ask — which layer of tolerance do you mean? Is the data measuring it from the same ruler? Is the reference frame you stand in relative or absolute? These three questions matter more than any conclusion.