Profile | Chinese ballet dancer and social media star Sun Jia shows what goes on behind the curtain
Hong Kong Ballet dancer Sun Jia’s viral video content has garnered her hundreds of thousands of fans across Douyin, RedNote and Instagram
After spending much of her youth training at ballet studios in mainland China, the US and Germany, Sun Jia has been dancing professionally with the Hong Kong Ballet since 2022. But she has a side mission: to show the world what goes on behind the curtains through social media.
Born in China’s Shandong province, Sun regularly posts short-form comedic video content, offering glimpses into the world of professional ballet dancing to her more than 450,000 fans on Douyin – the Chinese version of TikTok – and 158,000-plus followers on RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu.
She has also garnered more than 63,000 followers on Instagram, for which she records English-language voice-overs, instead of her usual Mandarin.
“When people think about ballet dancers, they only see what they see on stage – pretty and elegant,” she says. “But we are human beings, and I thought it’d be interesting to show what we do every day and show people another side to our profession.”
Sun had been posting about her personal ballerina life since the Covid-19 pandemic, when she lived in Dresden, Germany, but it was in Hong Kong, in 2023, that she began creating her own content after seeing “A day in the life of” videos on social media.
Her first few videos were well received, so she kept going. She has kept an active online presence ever since, using only her smartphone and CapCut, a Chinese short-form video editing app.