At China’s biggest gaming convention, the showgirl culture isn’t going to die so easily

Chen Yuxin teaches kindergarten in Shanghai when school is in, but over the summer break she took on a gig that her students and teaching colleagues knew nothing about.

For four days, the 23-year-old ditched her schoolteacher look for cute make-up, a pink mini sailor skirt, and 3-inch high heels to entertain a potential audience of 350,000 – predominantly male.

Chen was one of the thousands of showgirls employed at ChinaJoy, China’s biggest gaming convention, that concluded in Shanghai earlier this month. First held in 2004, ChinaJoy built a reputation over the years for the scantily clad girls that exhibitors often used to hawk their products. It even got to the stage where the gaming show was jokingly referred to by the three Chinese characters that sound similar to its name – chai naizhao – which means “undo a bra.”

That all changed in 2015 when conference organiser Shanghai Hanwei, which declined to comment for this story, introduced strict costume guidelines for the showgirls which, among other things, banned them from revealing more than 2 centimetres (nearly 0.8 inches) of cleavage, or risk a substantial fine.

While the “sex sells” vibe of earlier exhibitions has been toned down, showgirls like Chen remain a major appeal of ChinaJoy, where the country’s biggest gaming firms like Tencent and NetEase deploy an army of young women – now more fully dressed – to greet and entertain the mainly male attendees.

The practice is a reflection of the sexism still rampant in China’s gaming industry, the world’s largest with estimated sales of US$15 billion in the first half of this year, where women still have a long way to go before they are seen as anything more than decoration.