Canadian scholar Erik Bordeleau has interpreted Frozen as an allegory of the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China. Qi Lei’s “experience of a radical loss of social subjectivity, staged in performative terms, powerfully echoes also that of the Tiananmen survivors, those whose lives did not come to an end, as did the world to which they belonged.”Erik Bordeleau, “Surviving to Oneself after Tiananmen: Wang Xiaoshuai’ s Frozen (1996)”, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 40(2014): 105–124 (122).
