China’s 10-year-old hip hop dance sensation has the moves, but critics say she’s being sexualised
- Amy Zhu’s dance videos have hundreds of thousands of views and the Chengdu native has already travelled the world to perform
- But critics decry the sexualisation of a little girl and say a child has no place in the world of hip hop dancing
Watch her speak – such as during a recent appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, for example – and Amy Zhu seems like any other 10-year-old girl, albeit with hipper clothes.
But watch her dance and you see someone transformed: when the beats start, Zhu moves with the confidence, grace and attitude of someone three times her age.
Zhu is an archetypal star of the internet age. Her dance videos garner hundreds of thousands of views on social media platforms in China and the United States. But if her age helped her videos go viral, it is her sheer skill that has endeared her to the dance world and won her an army of followers across the globe.
As her fame has grown, however, she has also caught the eye of critics and detractors who decry what they see as the sexualisation of a little girl and say a child has no place in the world of hip-hop dancing.
Zhu, a native of Chengdu city in China’s Sichuan province, starting dancing at the age of five after her mother signed her up for classes. But it wasn’t until two years later that she started taking dance seriously. That was after attending a jazz dance class at Sinostage Studio, where she still trains.
