From “Natural Female” to “Artificial Beauty”: Chen Lili and the Public History of Pageant Eligibility in China, 2004

Abstract

In 2004, Chen Lili (陈莉莉), a transgender woman from Sichuan, registered for the Sichuan selection of Miss Universe China and passed through a rapid sequence of institutional states: local registration, provisional acceptance, higher-level rule interpretation, cancellation of competitive eligibility, and a later appearance on the same stage as a special guest. During the same year, Beijing model Yang Yuan was removed from the Miss Intercontinental Beijing contest because of her cosmetic-surgery history and took the organizer to court. In December, Beijing hosted the inaugural Miss Artificial Beauty contest, where transgender contestant Liu Xiaojing competed and Shanghai contestant Cheng Lili (成莉莉) finished third. More than two decades of republication, digitization, and encyclopedia compression later, some of these people and events have been joined together incorrectly. A current English-language account still says that Chen Lili entered the first Miss Artificial Beauty contest and finished as second runner-up, even though the cited China.org article names Cheng Lili as the second runner-up.

This essay treats 2004 as a collision among competing regimes of eligibility rather than a linear story of movement from exclusion to acceptance. Using contemporaneous reporting, later digital archives, and research on gender, the body, cosmetic surgery, and transgender life in China, it develops two tools: an eligibility stack and a name-event provenance ledger. The first separates legal documentation, local registration, higher-level rule interpretation, competitive eligibility, exhibition visibility, and media visibility. The second binds a person’s Chinese-character name to an event, date, venue, role, publication date, source type, and citation target. The resulting chronology shows that Chen could hold a female identity card, complete registration, and appear on the pageant stage while still being kept outside the formal ranking system by a “natural female” rule. Exclusion from competition simultaneously increased her news visibility. The historical change of 2004 therefore unfolded on two unsynchronized tracks: who counted as an eligible contestant and who could become a publicly visible female figure.

Keywords: Chen Lili; transgender history; Miss Universe; Miss Artificial Beauty; beauty pageants; cosmetic surgery; public visibility; eligibility; media history; mainland China

Research materials and method: realigning people, events, and eligibility levels

The core materials are newspaper reports, wire stories, television interviews, and portal republications published from February through December 2004, supplemented by academic research and digital records that remain accessible today. Contemporaneous sources matter because later summaries easily compress “registered,” “was provisionally accepted,” “competed,” “appeared onstage,” “reached the final,” and “won a placement” into the single verb competed. This study separates those actions and records the event name, institutional speaker, date, and Chinese-character name used at the time.

The first analytical device is an eligibility stack:

legal document status → local registration → national/international rule interpretation → competitive eligibility → non-competitive exhibition eligibility → media visibility

Different layers of this stack can produce different outcomes at the same moment. A person may be documented as female by an administrative authority and accepted by a local organizer, yet lose ranking eligibility after a higher-level organization interprets its rules more narrowly. She may still enter the same stage as a guest and receive the greatest media attention of the event. Separating these layers gives a more precise historical account than an undifferentiated language of “acceptance” and “rejection.”

The second device is a name-event provenance ledger. Each claim records at minimum the person’s name in Chinese characters, event, date, venue, role, source date, source type, citation target, and narrative distance. It is designed for cases such as 陈莉莉 (Chen Lili) and 成莉莉 (Cheng Lili): their romanized forms are similar, their first Chinese characters differ, and their stories circulated in the same year within the same broad domain of pageants and bodily transformation.

Later scholarship supplies interpretive context without replacing evidence from 2004. Histories of sex and medicine in China show that bodies, medical classifications, and legal status have long been organized through multiple institutional languages (Chiang, 2018). Research on cosmetic surgery and beauty in China shows that the early 2000s were also a period in which commercial beauty and bodily modification became highly visible forms of consumption and self-making (Hua, 2013; Ma, 2022). These contexts help explain why “transsexuality,” “cosmetic surgery,” “natural,” and “artificial” came to occupy the same media cycle. They do not establish that different people entered the same contest.

1. The pageant field of 2004: gender status, bodily modification, and commercial media expanded together

In the early twenty-first century, beauty pageants, modeling, cosmetic surgery, television, and portal news increasingly reinforced one another in urban China. Cosmetic surgery appeared not only as reconstructive medicine but also as an investment in employability, personal presentation, and modern femininity. Wen Hua’s work places the expansion of cosmetic surgery within marketization, bodily capital, and the growth of a professional beauty industry. Later research on Chinese women’s beauty ideals and attitudes toward surgery likewise links appearance comparison, social evaluation, self-objectification, and consumer culture to decisions about cosmetic procedures (Hua, 2013; Sun, 2018; Wu et al., 2022).

This was the communication environment in which Chen Lili became a national story. Her news value drew on several social classifications at once: she came from a county in Sichuan, had modeling and performance experience, had undergone gender-affirming surgery, obtained a female identity card, and sought entry into a national commercial pageant system. Reports therefore positioned her simultaneously within narratives of the “new woman,” medical transformation, personal striving, entertainment, and the pageant economy. Her transgender history was part of her effort to live publicly as a woman, while news organizations repeatedly turned that history into the leading label.

Contemporary transgender scholarship provides a second historical reference point. Transgender people in China encounter different institutional interfaces in health care, family life, school, public health, and public attitudes (Wang et al., 2020; Lin et al., 2021; Chan et al., 2024). A commercial pageant in 2004 was an earlier kind of public interface. It did not determine Chen’s legal sex. It publicly forced a different question: would female documentation automatically translate into female competitive eligibility?

2. The first gate had opened: Chen Lili’s female identity card and local registration

Around February 21, 2004, Chen registered for the Sichuan selection of Miss Universe China. Reports from the time say that she disclosed her history to staff, that the local organizers processed her paperwork, and that they referred the unusual eligibility question upward within the pageant organization. A February 23 report described the initial signal as a “green light.” A February 26 Morning Post report said the Sichuan organizing committee had received permission from New York to accept the application first and work out detailed rules afterward (Jianghuai Morning News, 2004; Morning Post, 2004).

The essential point is that acceptance of an application and final competitive eligibility were separate institutional moments. Public information shifted quickly in late February, and reporters did not always receive identical versions of the decision process. Early reports read registration as a breakthrough; soon afterward, national or international pageant authorities supplied a narrower interpretation. When arranged by date, the reports show a rule dispute unfolding in public rather than a single, timeless yes-or-no decision.

Chen also held a female resident identity card. Contemporary and later reports repeatedly treated that document as the basis for her claim that she should be eligible as a woman. Her position exposed a structural gap: an administrative document could recognize her as female while a private commercial organization retained its own eligibility definition. Research on transgender legal and medical life in China has continued to show that household registration, identity cards, medical documentation, marriage, education records, and employment records form different interfaces. A change in one does not automatically propagate to every other institution (Chiang, 2018; Lin et al., 2021).

3. “Natural female” became a second gate: rule interpretation changed the outcome

On February 26–27, multiple contemporaneous reports announced that the Miss Universe organization had cancelled Chen’s formal eligibility. Reports carried by China News Service and Guangzhou Daily recorded the organizer’s explanation: the written standard referred to unmarried, healthy women within a specified age range, and the organization further interpreted “woman” as a “natural female” (China News Service, 2004; Guangzhou Daily, 2004).

This step moved the dispute away from the question of whether Chen’s identity documents said female and toward the pageant organization’s authority to define the category “woman.” In the eligibility stack, Chen had already received positive results at two layers: female documentation existed, and local registration had been accepted. A higher-level rule interpretation then overrode those openings for the purpose of ranking and advancement. The pageant did not invalidate her identity card or settle her gender across Chinese society. It created a narrower competitive category.

The phrase “natural female” was itself historically unstable. It bundled birth assignment, medical intervention, and competitive legitimacy into a short formula while leaving the operational boundary vague. Similar boundary questions would later appear in sport and international pageants. Commercial beauty systems simultaneously normalized orthodontics, skin treatments, makeup, surgery, and later digital enhancement. “Natural” therefore functioned selectively: some technologies of appearance were ordinary beauty practices, while other interventions were used to mark the edge of gender membership (Griffiths & Mullock, 2018; Wu et al., 2022).

The historical significance of Chen’s case thus lies partly in the hierarchy of rules. An organization could acknowledge her appearance, legal documents, and local application while still excluding her from a ranking system through a more restrictive categorical definition.

4. High visibility without eligibility: the March stage changed what exclusion meant

Chen’s removal from the formal competition did not remove her from the event. Reports around March 8 describe the Sichuan organizers inviting her to appear as a special guest and to present her talent and outfits on the pageant stage. Chengdu Commercial Daily reported that she appeared with 37 contestants. Morning Post and Chengdu Evening News emphasized that reporters surrounded her and that press attention exceeded the attention given to ordinary contestants (Chengdu Commercial Daily, 2004; Morning Post, 2004; Chengdu Evening News, 2004).

This intermediate condition can be described as visibility without eligibility. The competitive system removed her from scoring, advancement, and placement, while the communication system moved her toward the center of the event. Exhibition eligibility sat between formal competition and complete absence.

That intermediate status had several effects. For Chen, stage access meant that her female presentation entered a major commercial pageant setting in front of a large audience. For the organizers, a showcase allowed them to preserve the formal eligibility rule while retaining the public attention created by the controversy. For journalists, the conflict itself generated a continuing narrative.

International coverage further amplified the event. An AFP report published by the Taipei Times framed Chen within a story of growing social acceptance for transgender people in China. The Irish Times and El País connected her to China’s pageant boom (AFP, 2004; The Irish Times, 2004; EFE, 2004). Some reports even alternated between “Miss Universe” and “Miss World.” That naming drift is useful evidence in its own right: event labels can change quickly as a story travels across languages and syndication networks.

5. Chen Lili tried to change the terms of her own public identity

In a May interview, Chen expressed frustration with the press’s repeated use of “transsexual” as her primary label. She emphasized that she wanted to be understood as a woman living an ordinary life and pursuing performance work, rather than being permanently defined by her surgical history (Huashang Daily, 2004). This interview adds an important first-person layer to the earlier eligibility coverage.

Reading only the February dispute makes it easy to freeze Chen into the role of “the first transgender woman who challenged a pageant rule.” Her May interview shows a person already negotiating a different public identity: performer, woman, and individual rather than a category symbol. Her move into film and other entertainment work expanded the public narrative beyond a single pageant controversy (Sohu News, 2004).

The change also demonstrates that public visibility itself has layers. Being reported on, being watched, and having authority over one’s own description are different states. Later studies of transgender life in China similarly show that visibility can produce resources, solidarity, stigma, and risk at the same time (Yan et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020). Chen’s 2004 experience offers an early case in which exceptional exposure coexisted with a struggle over the language used to describe her.

6. Another dispute in the same year: Yang Yuan and the eligibility of an “artificial beauty”

In May 2004, Beijing produced another pageant dispute that looked similar in newspaper vocabulary but operated through a different institutional logic. Model Yang Yuan had entered the Beijing division of the Miss Intercontinental competition and advanced toward the final. Organizers then removed her after learning that she had undergone multiple cosmetic procedures and described her as an “artificial beauty.” Contemporary reporting emphasized that the published entry conditions had not previously listed cosmetic surgery as a bar to participation (Beijing Times, 2004).

Yang moved the dispute into court. The organizers later restored her eligibility, but she chose to withdraw and sued the company involved, seeking an apology and compensation under personality-rights claims. The court rejected her claim at first instance, yet the reporting preserved the central controversy: how clearly must a commercial contest specify bodily conditions before using them to remove a participant? (News Afternoon, 2004; Xinhua, 2004). CCTV’s News Salon placed the controversy inside the rapidly expanding “beauty economy” (CCTV, 2004).

Chen’s and Yang’s stories converged around the vocabulary of “natural” and “artificial,” but they concerned different people and different exclusions. Chen faced a rule interpretation centered on birth sex and transgender history. Yang faced a newly invoked distinction based on cosmetic-surgery history. Their disputes shared a larger commercial problem: as beauty technologies became more common, pageants still sought authenticity through selected claims of naturalness.

7. The year-end Miss Artificial Beauty contest reversed the eligibility logic

By December 2004, Beijing hosted the first national Miss Artificial Beauty contest. It inverted the earlier exclusion: cosmetic alteration became part of the event’s identity and attraction. A contemporary China Daily/China.org report explicitly linked the new contest to the controversy that followed Yang Yuan’s exclusion earlier that year (China Daily, 2004).

A transgender contestant did enter this new contest: Liu Xiaojing (刘晓晶). Reports from December 13–15 record Liu publicly discussing her transition history and becoming a focal point for reporters. Coverage folded gender-affirming surgery together with other cosmetic procedures under the event’s broad language of artificial beauty (Beijing Times, 2004; Beijing News, 2004; China Youth Online, 2004). The vocabulary is historically revealing precisely because it is imprecise. A commercial beauty event placed gender-affirming care, facial surgery, age, and consumer transformation inside one spectacle of technologically altered bodies.

The final results are also clear. A December 19 Beijing News report lists Feng Qian as winner, Zhang Shuang as runner-up, and Cheng Lili (成莉莉) as third place. Liu Xiaojing and 62-year-old Liu Yulan received the “Best News Impression Award” and did not reach the top ten (Beijing News, 2004). A December 22 interview with Yang Yuan again listed Feng Qian, Zhang Shuang, and Cheng Lili as the top three and described Yang as a catalyst for the contest while noting that she herself did not compete (Times News, 2004).

This produces the central archival fork of the essay: Chen Lili, Liu Xiaojing, and Cheng Lili are three different people. Chen belongs to the early-year Miss Universe Sichuan eligibility dispute. Liu belongs to the year-end Miss Artificial Beauty contest as a transgender contestant. Cheng belongs to the year-end contest as its third-place finisher.

8. A verifiable digital archival collision: Chen Lili and Cheng Lili are joined together

As of this writing, the English Wikipedia article “Chen Lili (model)” still states that Chen later competed in China’s first Miss Artificial Beauty contest and finished as second runner-up. One of the citations attached to that claim is the China.org article “China’s 1st Miss Plastic Surgery Pageant” (Wikipedia contributors, 2026).

Following that citation to its target produces a different person. The China.org article identifies Cheng Lili (成莉莉) from Shanghai as the second runner-up/third-place finisher and describes cosmetic procedures she had undergone (China.org.cn, 2004). The contemporaneous Chinese final report likewise prints 成莉莉 as the third-place contestant while listing transgender contestant Liu Xiaojing under a separate media-impression award (Beijing News, 2004).

The available evidence therefore supports treating “Chen Lili won third place in Miss Artificial Beauty” as a person-event misattachment. Three independent anchors support the separation: the Chinese-character surnames differ; the early-year and year-end contests differ; and the December record distinguishes Cheng’s placement from Liu’s transgender participation.

The exact origin of the misattachment requires more caution. The public record supports a plausible propagation path: Chen Lili and Cheng Lili are close romanizations; both stories belong to 2004; both circulate within the pageant/artificial-beauty news domain; later summaries often omit Chinese characters; and encyclopedia editing can reuse a source that actually points to Cheng while attaching it to a sentence about Chen. This is a reconstruction of the error conditions, rather than a claim about the intention or precise edit that first produced the error.

The pattern can be called an archival collision. Digitization makes old news much easier to retrieve, but search engines, mirrors, encyclopedias, and generated summaries can collapse similar names into a single entity. Greater retrievability therefore increases the value of fine-grained identity fields.

9. Why one Chinese character can change the history: the name-event provenance ledger

Placing the 2004 materials in a provenance ledger makes the collision visible immediately:

The table does more than repair a sentence in an encyclopedia. It models a basic practice for transgender public history: every assertion about a “first,” entry, award, rejection, or appearance should bind a person to a date, organization, eligibility layer, and source. Transgender people have often been represented through labels that replace personal names, while syndicated reports lose original titles, bylines, and Chinese characters. Those conditions increase the risk of identity collision.

The same discipline applies to medical and social research. Studies of transgender populations in China have repeatedly confronted the mixing of diagnostic categories, behavioral categories, gender identities, and surgical status (Tang et al., 2016; Lin et al., 2021). Historical editing creates a parallel error when it treats “had surgery,” “changed legal documents,” “self-identified as,” and “was called X by the press” as one variable.

10. What the eligibility stack reveals: recognition and organizational admission moved at different speeds

When the four people are returned to the eligibility stack, the history of 2004 moves in several directions at once.

Chen’s path was: administrative female recognition, open local registration, restrictive higher-level rule interpretation, closure of formal competition, reopening of the stage as exhibition, and a sharp increase in media visibility. Yang’s path began with ordinary eligibility, shifted to exclusion because of cosmetic surgery, returned briefly to restored eligibility, and then moved into litigation and voluntary withdrawal. By the end of the year, the market had turned “artificial beauty” itself into a pageant brand. Liu entered that new pageant formally, while her media prominence and final ranking remained separate. Cheng’s story shows a different archival problem: an ordinary contest placement can later migrate to a more famous person with a similar romanized name.

The year therefore contains institutional tightening, commercial opening, legal recognition, labeling, and archival collision at the same time. A single narrative of society becoming progressively “more tolerant” would miss those simultaneous processes. AFP’s 2004 headline about transgender people “gaining acceptance” captured real developments in legal documents, visibility, and everyday opportunity. The same period also preserved explicit organizational boundaries (AFP, 2004).

11. “Natural” and “artificial” were actually three different classifications

Reporting in 2004 repeatedly used “natural female,” “natural beauty,” and “artificial beauty.” The words appear to sit on one natural/artificial continuum, but they performed at least three different classificatory tasks.

The first was gender eligibility. “Natural female” in the Miss Universe dispute marked a boundary around birth assignment and transgender history. The second was beauty authenticity. “Artificial beauty” in Yang Yuan’s case referred to cosmetic-surgery history and carried no necessary claim about legal gender. The third was commercial branding. The year-end Miss Artificial Beauty contest converted bodily intervention into an attraction and entry identity.

The classifications borrowed vocabulary from each other but remained analytically distinct. Treating a transgender woman simply as a “cosmetically altered beauty” collapses gender-affirming medical care into consumer beautification. Treating cisgender cosmetic-surgery contestants and transgender women as though they confronted the same rule likewise obscures different forms of eligibility. Scholarship on beauty in China links cosmetic surgery to labor markets, consumption, body image, and social evaluation (Hua, 2013; Ma, 2022; Wu et al., 2022). Transgender health research links gender-affirming intervention to congruence, social recognition, health-care access, and body satisfaction (Li et al., 2021; Barnhart et al., 2023). The literatures can illuminate one another while preserving the boundaries of their objects.

12. Pageants did not represent all of society, but they acted as dense public laboratories

Beauty contests are not proxies for Chinese society as a whole. They are commercial institutions with sponsor interests, visual standards, television and press incentives, and proprietary rules. Those characteristics also make them unusually dense public laboratories of gender classification: rules must be stated, disputed decisions require explanation, results are public, and media amplify changes in status.

Chen’s case makes the layered interface particularly visible. A female identity card was an administrative interface. A pageant application was a local organizational interface. The headquarters’ definition of “woman” was a transnational commercial-rule interface. The special showcase was a communication interface. Each layer could recognize a different fact.

This model resembles findings in later transgender research. Health services, schools, families, and public-health systems each create their own categories and thresholds (Peng et al., 2019; Sha et al., 2021; Chan et al., 2024). Recognition in one domain can precede recognition in another. High visibility in one domain can coexist with low access in another. The pageant controversy of 2004 made that structure unusually public.

13. Counterevidence and source limits: preventing a correction from becoming another legend

The source separation proposed here has limits. First, contemporaneous media did not always use the same event name. Several international reports associated Chen with “Miss World,” while the Chinese contemporaneous record centers on the Miss Universe China/Sichuan selection system. This essay therefore treats the Sichuan organizers and on-site Chinese reporting as the main event spine, while preserving cross-language title drift as part of the media history (The Irish Times, 2004; EFE, 2004).

Second, the language of 2004 reporting often used labels that today read as stigmatizing or sensational. The essay keeps historically necessary terms when analyzing the eligibility rule or the title of a source, while using names and the present-day term “transgender woman” in its own narration. Source titles remain unchanged in the bibliography so that readers can locate the record.

Third, the surviving material about Cheng Lili is much thinner than the record about Chen. The available sources establish that Cheng placed third in the inaugural Miss Artificial Beauty contest and that China.org used the romanization “Cheng Lili.” They provide no basis for an additional inference about her gender identity. The provenance-ledger method works precisely by recording what a source establishes and leaving unsupported fields open.

Fourth, the current encyclopedia/source mismatch can be demonstrated, but the accessible evidence used here does not establish the exact first edit that created it. The essay therefore distinguishes two claims: contemporaneous evidence directly supports the separation of Chen and Cheng and assigns the third-place result to Cheng; similarity of names, year, pageant genre, and citation reuse form a plausible mechanism for later conflation.

14. The longer history: public womanhood was produced by several institutions at once

On a longer timeline, Chen’s case belongs to a period in which medical, legal, and media systems of gender were being recombined. Chiang’s histories of sex and medicine in China show that modern scientific categories of sex developed alongside state institutions, medical practice, and projects of modernity (Chiang, 2012; Chiang, 2018). In the 2000s, commercial television, portal news, and the cosmetic-surgery industry placed bodily transformation into a new system of mass visibility.

Chen’s female identity card shows that an administrative system could update sex designation for at least some people after medical transition. The Miss Universe rule shows that a commercial institution could still maintain a boundary based on birth status. The news event gave Chen greater national visibility after competitive exclusion. Her later objection to being reduced to a transition label shows a further layer in which the subject sought control over the narrative itself. Public womanhood was therefore produced through negotiation among administrative documents, medicine, commercial rules, the stage, journalism, and self-description rather than by a single surgery or a single piece of identification.

Later research has mapped these structures more systematically. Chinese transgender populations experience distinct distributions of discrimination, psychological stress, health-care barriers, family conflict, and body-image concerns (Wang et al., 2020; Lin et al., 2021; Barnhart et al., 2023). A single pageant case cannot substitute for population research. It can, however, show how an institutional boundary was articulated at a specific historical moment.

15. Archival practice: keep a Chinese-character anchor for historical people

The Chen/Cheng collision suggests a practical rule for digital historical editing: Chinese historical people need a Chinese-character anchor in multilingual data. With romanization alone, Chen/Cheng and other near-matches can disappear into search and summarization systems.

A GenderLibs-style provenance ledger can preserve at least eight fields:

Chinese-character name | romanization | event | event date | place | role | contemporaneous source | later citation target

For disputed “first,” “only,” “entered,” or “won” claims, a ninth field should record evidence distance: on-site contemporaneous reporting, interview, institutional record, retrospective history, encyclopedia summary, or generated synthesis. Such structure makes it harder for future search systems and AI summaries to merge near-matching people, while giving human reviewers a clear verification path.

The method also applies to aliases and historical labels. Older reporting frequently replaces a transgender person’s name with a nickname or a sensational category. An archive can preserve such strings as properties of the source while linking the person entity to a formal name and self-described identity. That approach supports retrieval without turning a historical label into the person’s canonical identity.

Conclusion

Chen Lili’s 2004 pageant controversy was more than a story about a contestant being rejected. It was a sequence in which several institutional gates became visible to the public. Chen held a female identity card, completed local registration, briefly received a favorable signal, lost formal competitive eligibility under a higher-level interpretation of “natural female,” then returned to the same stage as a special guest and became one of the event’s most visible figures. Declining eligibility and rising visibility happened together.

Yang Yuan encountered a different “natural beauty” boundary later that year after cosmetic surgery, and litigation moved questions of rule transparency and personal rights into the public discussion. The inaugural Miss Artificial Beauty contest then transformed bodily alteration from a reason for exclusion into a commercial entry identity. Transgender contestant Liu Xiaojing entered that contest, while its third-place finisher was Shanghai contestant Cheng Lili (成莉莉). Two decades later, part of the digital record attached Cheng’s placement to the more famous Chen Lili (陈莉莉).

The most useful historical conclusion is therefore a differentiated eligibility stack rather than a simple curve of liberalization or restriction. Legal status, organizational registration, rule interpretation, competitive eligibility, exhibition access, and media visibility could move in different directions. Binding Chinese-character names, events, roles, and citation targets at the source level turns this episode from a legendary summary into a verifiable history of institutions, media, and transgender public life.

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31. 成都晚报 / 新浪. 2004-03-08. “变性人陈莉莉环姐赛上展风采 感谢组委会给机会.” https://ent.sina.com.cn/s/m/2004-03-08/0715324340.html
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36. 搜狐新闻. 2004-06-11. “‘中国第一变性大师’冲冠一怒为‘红颜’.” https://news.sohu.com/2004/06/11/60/news220486082.shtml
37. 京华时报 / 新浪. 2004-05-22. “选美大赛取消‘人造美女’参赛资格.” https://news.sina.com.cn/s/2004-05-22/03492594531s.shtml
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42. 新京报 / 新浪. 2004-12-14. “首届人造美女大赛将举行 专家称伤害整容失败者.” https://news.sina.com.cn/s/2004-12-14/01024513110s.shtml
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44. 新京报 / 新浪. 2004-12-19. “人造美女大赛涉嫌内定 组委会否认收取赞助费.” https://news.sina.com.cn/s/2004-12-19/02004562674s.shtml
45. 时代信报 / 新浪. 2004-12-22. “专访人造美女杨媛：人造与天然没有区别.” https://news.sina.com.cn/s/2004-12-22/18475301010.shtml
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48. Wikipedia contributors. “Chen Lili (model).” Current article consulted 2026-09-19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Lili_%28model%29