‘China’s Barbie’: Why boxing movie YOLO has proved a knock-out with female audiences

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jin Shan was working for a logistics company, helping send food parcels and other supplies to Shanghai, then under strict lockdown. She would work all day and night, dealing with angry, frustrated customers and transportation hurdles. She often struggled to sleep.

Even after the pandemic faded, the stress did not, so one day in early 2023, when she “could no longer stand it,” Ms. Jin walked into Fist Heart Fist Power, a boxing gym near her home in Beijing. She’s been going regularly ever since.

“I think I left all the bad emotions and stress in this gym,” she told The Globe and Mail.

Open this photo in gallery:

Ms. Jin is one of a growing number of Chinese women who – facing pressures connected to a struggling economy, low birth rate and pervasive sexism – have taken up boxing. Many were inspired by the hit film YOLO, which dominated the Chinese box office over the recent Lunar New Year holiday and was released internationally this month, including in Canada.

YOLO tells the story of Leying, an unemployed woman who has essentially withdrawn from the world before a chance encounter with a boxing trainer begins a journey of self-improvement, culminating in a Rocky-esque finale.

The movie was directed by and stars Jia Ling, a well-known stand-up comedian whose first movie Hi, Mom – which focused on mother-daughter relationships – was the highest-grossing film by a solo female director worldwide until Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

To play Leying, Ms. Jia gained and then lost a significant amount of weight. Initial coverage of the movie focused on her physical transformation, with some criticizing the weight loss as a stunt by an actress best known for playing comedic side characters whose size is often the butt of the joke.

“It’s an unwinnable game, the rules of which are familiar to any woman,” Liu Qing, an editor at the Wenhui Bao, a Shanghai newspaper, wrote in a piece about YOLO. “Gain weight, and no one takes you seriously. Lose weight, and you’re just making a play for attention.”

Ms. Jia’s “stunning physical transformation was a red herring,” she said, distracting audiences from the true message of the film, which is about female self-acceptance and empowerment, with Leying even rejecting a male character set up as the stereotypical love interest.

In a letter to fans after YOLO’s release, Ms. Jia said, “this movie isn’t about weight loss, or even boxing, it’s about how a kind person finds herself and learns to love herself.”

According to e-commerce giant Alibaba, searches for “fitness” in China spiked after the film hit theatres, with sales of boxing gloves jumping 60 per cent between Feb. 10 and Feb. 19. For a time, it seemed the sport would become just another weight loss fad on the Chinese internet, where posts promoting disordered eating and stunts such as the “A4 challenge” – in which women compared their waist size with a single sheet of paper – are common.

But as more and more people saw YOLO and were inspired to try boxing, many women began discussing the sport as a way to seek empowerment in a society where they are too often judged by their appearance, and in which female voices are being increasingly stifled.

“I think people who watch this movie and go on a crazy diet just to be skinny don’t actually understand the movie,” said Zhang Rong, a pharmaceutical researcher from Zhangzhou, in southern Fujian province. She previously saw boxing as a sport for men, she added, but “now, I think it’s not necessary to link strength to men, women can be powerful too.”

Ms. Jin, the Beijing boxer, compared the movie’s message of empowerment and challenging patriarchy to Barbie, which was also a smash hit with female audiences in China.

“The film opens viewers’ eyes to the possibilities of strength and the strong will in women,” she said.

Boxing coach Yu Zengyang, who owns Fist Heart First Power, said there has been in a spike in women coming to classes since YOLO opened. He hopes the film’s success can help break stereotypes of the sport as violent or barbaric.

“I think the movie is very inspirational and uplifting,” Mr. Yu said, adding that it lines up with his own focus on helping clients build strength and self-confidence rather than lose weight.

Emily Liu, who writes the Chinese pop culture newsletter Active Faults, said YOLO “is not a feminist film,” but what should be celebrated is that in Ms. Jia, “Chinese entertainment finally has a female figure on a managerial level with agenda-setting power.”

“Someone like Jia will place more women in leading roles and production crews,” she wrote recently. “She will continue to create a healthy working environment on set.”

That, Ms. Liu said, could create space for something “far more radical and transformative.”

With files from Alexandra Li in Beijing