Besides revenues from the box office, Jin Xing has held several side jobs, including being a massively popular television talk show hostess in the past decade.

"People say that's my profession. No. That's my side job, part-time job," she said, adding that she has used the money earned on the television screen to fund her dance company.

Jin said she will never give up the theater for television, despite her increasing popularity on screen that may be partly due to her straightforward, sometimes controversial style.

She said she still wants to contribute to television because so many people love to listen to her talk, something she said she did not expect in the beginning.

The international version of the Jin Xing talk show will be unveiled in Singapore in April.

"I consider myself a stage person," she said, "Very simple, Jin Xing is just a dancer. I am a contemporary dancer."

Jin herself performed for the last time on stage in 2019 at the age of 52 and has since focused on her role as artistic director of her dance theater. She launched the Mars Theater Society, a drama company, in 2021 and set up the Jin Xing Dance Theater Paris in 2019.

She now splits her time between Shanghai and Paris.

Jin first joined the Shenyang military region dancing troupe in Northeast China, at the age of 11. She graduated from the People's Liberation Army Academy of Art Dancing Department in 1984. In 1988, she won a scholarship to study modern dance in the United States, spending four years in New York.