Dai Jinhua

Dai Jinhua (戴锦华; born 1959) is a Chinese literary and film scholar, professor at Peking University's Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and director of the university's Center for Film and Cultural Studies. She is one of the earliest scholars in mainland China to work systematically on feminist theory, Chinese film history, and cultural studies, and her work has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, and Korean.^{1 • 2}

Education and early career

Dai Jinhua entered the Chinese literature program of Peking University's Department of Chinese Language and Literature in 1978 and graduated in 1982. Through state assignment she then joined the faculty of the Beijing Film Academy's Department of Film Literature, where she taught literature while teaching herself film. She began teaching film courses around 1985.^{1 • 5}

She has described her entry into film as accidental: assigned to deliver tickets for a summer film workshop, she watched more than a hundred classics of world cinema in her first year, including Breathless, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and The 400 Blows, and, in her words, fell in love with the medium.⁴ In the mid-1980s, visiting professors from the University of California film programs lectured in China, giving her generation systematic access to contemporary European and American film theory.⁶

In 1987 she participated in establishing China's first film history and theory specialization at the Beijing Film Academy, designing its curriculum and personally interviewing its first admissions cohort; its first undergraduates graduated between 1987 and 1990. She was promoted to associate professor there in 1992.^{1 • 7}

Move to Peking University and international work

In 1990 Dai began teaching part-time at Peking University at the invitation of the comparative literature scholar Le Daiyun, and in 1993 she transferred permanently to the university's Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture. In October 1995 she established China's first comparative culture research office there. She was appointed professor in 1997, became a doctoral supervisor in 2001, and has directed the Peking University Center for Film and Cultural Studies since 2008.^{1 • 7}

From October 1994 to July 1995 she held academic visits at Cornell University, UCLA, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lectured on Chinese film and popular culture at more than ten American universities, including Harvard and Berkeley. In 1997 she was appointed an adjunct professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Ohio State University, returning every two years to run intensive summer courses.¹

Research and major works

Dai's research spans Chinese film history, popular culture, and gender studies. Her reputation rests on three bodies of work. With Meng Yue she wrote Emerging from the Horizon of History (《浮出历史地表》, 1989), the first book-length study to apply a feminist standpoint systematically to modern Chinese women's literature, and a foundational text of Chinese feminist literary criticism.^{2 • 4} Her film studies are centered on Scenery in the Fog (《雾中风景》, covering Chinese film culture 1978–1998) and Film Criticism (《电影批评》, 2004). Her cultural-studies work includes Invisible Writing (《隐形书写》, 1999), an analysis of 1990s Chinese culture, and Gendering China (《性别中国》, 2006).^{1 • 2}

Her method places individual films inside broader political, economic, and cultural contexts rather than reading them as closed texts. In After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Duke University Press, 2018), drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, she examines recent Chinese films that erase the country's socialist history, arguing that this erasure resignifies the socialist past as failure and narrows the imaginable future to globalized capitalism.³ Her English collection Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, edited by Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow, appeared from Verso in 2002 and gathers nine chapters ranging from Fifth and Sixth Generation films to 1990s consumer culture.⁸

She has also described a turn in the 1990s from film criticism toward cultural studies, saying that film alone could no longer explain film as a phenomenon and that her work examines the culture industry and popular culture to read changes in Chinese and world political economy.^{5 • 9}

Reception and public presence

English-language scholarship describes Dai as the leading feminist, cultural, and film critic in China, and notes the reputations attached to her name: first feminist critic in China, founder of film studies in China, founder of cultural studies in China, and "China's Susan Sontag."² The anthropologist Lisa Rofel, editor of After the Post-Cold War, has called her the equivalent of a rock star in China, drawing students, intellectuals, and the general public to her lectures.¹⁰

Her public teaching is a substantial part of her profile. At Peking University she runs weekly film screenings with post-screening commentary in the university hall, sessions that drew nearly two thousand attendees by 2025, and since 2021 her lectures have been shared online, reaching millions of viewers. She has also created online film courses including 50 Chinese Films, 52 Lives, and Gender and the Gaze, and edited Film for Children (《给孩子的电影》).^{4 • 11} She has said she dislikes the popular nickname "Dai Ye" (戴爷, roughly "Lord Dai"), reading it as carrying patriarchal connotations.¹¹

Selected bibliography

• Emerging from the Horizon of History (《浮出历史地表——现代中国妇女文学研究》), with Meng Yue, 1989/1990¹
• Manual of Film Theory and Criticism (《电影理论与批评手册》), 1993¹
• The Mirror and Secular Myths: Reading Eighteen Films (《镜与世俗神话》), 1995¹
• Invisible Writing: Chinese Cultural Studies in the 1990s (《隐形书写》), 1999¹
• Scenery in the Fog: Chinese Film Culture 1978–1998 (《雾中风景》), 1999¹
• The Boat Across: Chinese Women's Writing and Female Culture in the New Period (《涉渡之舟》), 2002¹
• Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, ed. Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow, Verso, 2002⁸
• Film Criticism (《电影批评》), 2004¹
• Gendering China (《性别中国》), 2006¹
• After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History, Duke University Press, 2018³

References

1. 戴锦华，北京大学中国语言文学系师资页
2. Ping Zhu, "Dai Jinhua," Chinese Literature Today 7:2 (2018)
3. After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History, Duke University Press
4. "Beyond the Screen: The Mind of Professor Dai Jinhua," Peking University News, May 27, 2025
5. 《清醒的立场——戴锦华女士访谈录》，价值中国
6. 《我毕业了，我看电影》，澎湃新闻
7. 《戴锦华教授：那个时代的魔术》，北京大学校友网
8. Megan Ferry, review of Cinema and Desire, MCLC Resource Center (2005)
9. 《戴锦华：文化研究最终关注的是人的福祉》，中国作家网（2019）
10. Lisa Rofel, Editor's Introduction to After the Post-Cold War
11. 《戴锦华：无尽削弱后，电影仍然是最具公众性的艺术形态》，南方周末（2024）

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Screen people and creators

Initially written Oct 10, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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