A substantial literature now links dance training to body image disturbance and disordered eating. Almost all of it, however, comes from Western ballet, and the theoretical frameworks it relies on share a single assumption: that harm begins when dancers internalize cultural ideals of thinness. This article introduces Institutional Body Surveillance (IBS) to name a distinct mechanism observed in Chinese pre-professional dance schools (yixiao), where systematic weight monitoring, public disclosure of body data, and performance-linked consequences form an institutionally mandated regime of body control imposed on students as young as ten. Drawing on analytic autoethnography from the author’s six years at a nationally recognized art school and seven years as a university dance educator within the Chinese professional dance system, the article identifies three core dimensions of IBS: systematicity, publicity, and consequentiality. The article proposes a dual-pathway model. The Internalization Pathway, mapped in detail by Western research, describes how cultural exposure leads to personal adoption of thin ideals. The Enforcement Pathway, which I argue is characteristic of the Chinese institutional context, bypasses internalization altogether: public shaming, learned helplessness, and performance-contingent self-esteem do the damage whether or not the student has personally adopted the weight standard. Self-Objectification Theory and Thin Ideal Internalization were not built to explain this second route. IBS may also apply beyond dance. Elite gymnastics and figure skating appear to harbour analogous regimes of body monitoring, and the concept is offered as a tool for comparative research across these domains. Perhaps most troublingly, the article traces a reproductive logic: those of us trained under IBS come to regard its practices as simply what training requires, and we carry them, often unknowingly, into our own teaching.
Yifei Liu (Fri,) studied this question.