“Every time I come here, I feel whole again” – Irene Zhao, then the chair of the Beijing Queer Film Festival’s organizing committee, recalled a visitor saying this to her after attending the festival in 2023. For that visitor, the festival was a rare space in China where queer people could meet, share their experiences, and feel accepted without having to either explain or conceal their identity. Zhao called it “a temporary sanctuary.”
Such sanctuaries are becoming harder and harder to find for China’s LBGTQ community. On October 29, the organizers announced that the Beijing Queer Film Festival would be canceled this year, just one day before its scheduled opening. In the weeks before the announcement, they had reportedly received repeated calls from the police.
The same day, Wuhan Berlin Film Week, an independent film event, announced that it was postponing its screenings, without giving any reason. The two announcements were not necessarily connected, but they drew attention to the mounting obstacles for independent cultural spaces in China, particularly those that allow people to express identities outside officially sanctioned norms.
Founded by students at Peking University in 2001, the Beijing Queer Film Festival was conceived as a public forum for both films and discussions about sexuality and gender identity. It has a long history of disruptions – in fact, the very first edition was interrupted by university authorities. In 2005, organizers had to move screenings from their original venue after the police intervened. In 2011, after officials ordered the festival canceled, organizers shifted screenings to bars and cafes around Beijing. In 2013, the festival held its screenings in central Beijing without immediate government interference for the first time.
Today, the pressure on China’s queer community is growing once again. In May 2023, the Beijing LGBT Center, which had provided services and a physical gathering place, announced that it would cease operations. That August, WeChat shut down the accounts of several LGBTQ and feminist organizations. In November 2025, Apple confirmed that it had removed Blued and Finka – China’s two most popular gay dating apps – from its China App Store following an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China.
In China, both physical and digital gathering spaces for queer communities are facing new restrictions. Now, some are moving their efforts overseas.
“LeLaLes: Fluid Love,” a lesbian dating show, was initially planned for production in Shanghai. In an interview with “How to China,” director Ashley Jiang said that the police had contacted or harassed more than 30 people connected to the production, including cast and crew members and even friends who had shared crowdfunding information. She also said that the show’s logo was blocked on Chinese social media platforms, including Xiaohongshu, WeChat and Bilibili, and WeChat groups associated with the production were shut down.
The team subsequently moved production to Chiang Mai, Thailand. Eventually, the show was released on YouTube. Some participants continued to live in China, leaving the production team concerned about the risks they might face.
Jiang said she had wanted to create “a safe space for Chinese queer women to explore intimacy unapologetically and freely.” She was unable to create the space within China itself. Nevertheless, the show reached at least some Chinese viewers. One commenter on the lesbian social platform LesPark wrote that she had registered on the platform specifically to watch it. Another encouraged the production team to continue making the show they wanted to make, despite the criticism.
As “LeLaLes: Fluid Love” demonstrates, the pressure does not mean that queer life in China is coming to an end. But the resilience of creators and community members alike should not be allowed to obscure the cost of mounting restrictions on expressing queer identity.
Moving underground allows some cultural activity to continue, but it makes it harder for people to participate; a private queer gathering cannot reach the same audience as a public festival. In a similar vein, a show filmed overseas can tell stories in Chinese, but censorship can still restrict its reach inside the country. And perhaps more importantly, these restrictions send a message: that queer identity is something to be hidden on the margins of society, rather than welcomed into the mainstream.