As hip-hop grows in China, its artists are looking for a voice that reflects their lived experiences

CHENGDU, China – In 2018, censors overseeing Chinese media issued a directive to the country’s entertainment industry: do not feature artists with tattoos and those representing hip-hop or any other subculture.

Soon after, well-known rapper GAI lost a gig on a popular singing competition despite a successful first appearance. Speculation went wild: fans feared this was the end of hip-hop in China. Some media outlets labeled this as a ban.

The genre had just enjoyed a landmark year, with a hit competition-style television show that created new stars and introduced them to a country of 1.4 billion people. Rappers accustomed to operating on a shoestring and performing in small bars have become household names. The censors’ announcement came at the height of this frenzy. There was silence and for months no rappers appeared on the dozens of variety shows and singing competitions on Chinese TV.

But at the end of that year, everything went back to full steam. “Hip-hop was very popular,” says Nathanel Amar, a Chinese pop culture researcher at the French Center for Research on Contemporary China. “They couldn’t censor the entire genre.”

What seemed like the end of Chinese hip-hop was just the beginning.

Since then, hip-hop’s explosive growth in China has only continued. He did so by carving out a space for himself while staying away from government red lines, balancing genuine creative expression with something palatable in a country with powerful censors.

Today, musicians say they are looking forward to a golden age.

Much of the energy can be found in Chengdu, a city in the Sichuan region of southwestern China. Some of China’s greatest artists today come from Sichuan; Wang Yitai, Higher Brothers and Vava are just some of the names that made Chinese rap popular, performing in a mix of Mandarin and Sichuan dialects. Although hip-hop in Chengdu started out with very heavy trap sounds, its spread has meant that artists have expanded into lighter sounds, from R&B to afrobeat rhythms popularized by Beyoncé.

While Chinese rap has operated underground for decades in cities like Beijing, it is the Sichuan region – known internationally for its spicy cuisine, its panda reserve and its status as the birthplace of the late leader Deng Xiaoping – that has come to dominate.

“There are a lot of rhymes in rap. And from a young age we were exposed to a language with many rhymes. And I feel like we are its origin,” says Mumu Xiang, who is from Sichuan and recently attended a rap concert held in the city.

The dialect lends itself to rap because it is softer than Mandarin and there are a lot more rhymes, says rapper Kidway, 25, from a city outside Chengdu. “Take the word ‘gang’ in English. In Sichuanese, there are a lot of rhymes for the word ‘fang, sang, zhuang’, the rhymes are already there,” he says.

Chengdu also welcomes outsiders, says Haysen Cheng, a 24-year-old rapper who moved to the city from Hong Kong in 2021 to work on his music at the invitation of Harikiri, a British producer who helped shape the scene and worked with the Chengdu’s biggest acts.

Part of the city’s hip-hop tradition revolves around a collective called Chengdu Rap House or CDC, founded by a rapper called Boss X, whose fans affectionately call him “Xie laober” in the Sichuan dialect. The city embraced rap, as its creators, like Boss X, went from making music in a run-down apartment in an old residential community to performing in a stadium in front of thousands of people. At Boss X’s performance in March, fans sang and applauded in Sichuanese. Even with the ban on standing, which is standard for all stadium performances in China, the energy was contagious.

“When I came to mainland China, they showed me more love in three or four months than I ever received in Hong Kong,” says Cheng. He has collaborated with Higher Brothers, one of the few Chinese rap groups that also has global recognition. “People here really want others to succeed.”

The price of going mainstream, however, means that the underground scene has evaporated. Chengdu was once known for its underground rap battles. This no longer happens, as freestyling often involves profanity and other content that authorities deem unacceptable. The last time there was a rap battle in the city, rappers say, authorities showed up quickly and shut it down. These days it’s all digital, with people uploading short clips of their music to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to get noticed.

Kidway says he learned to rap by participating in these battles and competing against other rappers his age. He once worked at a remodeling company, but left it to pursue rapping full-time.

But even though the rap battles are over, the field has more rappers than ever. This is a good thing. “The more players there are,” he says, “the more interesting it will be.”

Rarely can it be said that a single cultural product gave rise to an entire musical genre. But the talent competition/reality show “The Rap of China” played an outsized role in building China’s rap industry.

The first season, broadcast on IQiyi, a web streaming platform, brought rap and hip-hop culture to families across the country. The first season’s 12 episodes attracted 2.5 billion views online, according to Chinese media reports.

In the first season, the show relied on the star power of its judges to attract audiences – namely Kris Wu, a Chinese-Canadian singer and former member of the hit K-pop group EXO. At that time, Wu was at the height of his fame, and comments about him as a judge that season even became memes on the internet. “Do you freestyle?” he asked a contestant, in all seriousness, in episode one—a moment he lived in internet infamy because people doubted Wu’s rap credentials.

Two winners emerged in the first season: GAI and PG One. Shortly after the victory, the internet was flooded with rumors about the less than perfect developments in PG One’s personal life. The Communist Youth League also criticized one of his old songs for the content it it appeared to be about cocaine use, sharply violating one of the censorship red lines.

Then came the 2018 meeting, where censors reminded television channels who could not appear on their programs, namely anyone representing hip-hop. PG One found that any attempts to release new music were quickly shot down by the platforms. The platform, IQiyi, even took down the entire first season for a while.

But in late summer 2018, fans were excited to learn they could expect a second season of “The Rap of China,” even though there was a rebrand. The name in English remained the same, but in Chinese it signaled a new direction. The program’s name changed from “China Has Hip-Hop” to “China Has ‘Shuochang’”, a term that also refers to traditional forms of storytelling.

Regulators gave the green light for hip-hop to continue growing, but they had to follow the lines set by government censors. Hip-hop was now shuochang and a symbol of youth culture; had to stay away from mentions of drugs and sex. Otherwise, however, it could continue.

“It was a success for Chinese regulators. … They’ve really managed to co-opt hip-hop artists,” says Amar. “It’s like a contract: if you want to be popular, if you want to appear on TV shows, you have to respect the red line.”

With strict censorship of the entertainment industry and the prohibition of mentions of drugs and sex in lyrics, artists reacted in two ways. Either they wholeheartedly embrace displays of patriotism and nationalism, or they avoid the topics.

Some, like GAI, have fully assumed the government’s role in mainstreaming hip-hop. He won “The Rap of China” award for a song called “Not Friendly” in which, in classic hip-hop fashion, he disparaged other rappers he didn’t name. “I’m not friendly. I can break your pen at any time. Tear up your flashy words. …My enemies, you better pray for a good ending.

Just a few years later, Gai is singing about China’s glorious history on CCTV’s Spring Festival New Year’s Gala broadcast, a well-scripted entertainment program featuring comedy sketches, songs and dance performances that is watched by families during the Chinese New Year celebration.

“Five thousand years of history flow like quicksand. I’m proud to be born in Cathay,” he sings, wearing a Qing Dynasty-inspired Tang jacket.

Red lines also pushed artists to be more creative. For Chinese rap to thrive, artists need to find original voices, they say. Rapper Fulai, 32, describes his own music as relaxing rap or “bedroom music” – not in the euphemistic sense, but in the kind of music you listen to while lying in bed. His next album, he says, is about ordinary things, like fighting with his wife and washing dishes.

Still, Fulai says he talks a lot about sex in his lyrics. Chinese is a language with countless sayings and a strong poetic tradition: “There’s nothing you can’t touch,” he says.

The development of a genuine Chinese rap brand remains a work in progress. Hip-hop began in the New York neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx, where rappers made music out of their difficult circumstances, from shootings, crime, and illegal drug trafficking. In China, the challenge is to find what fits your context. Shootings are rare in a country where guns are banned and penalties for drug use are high.

Rap crews in Chongqing, another megacity in the Sichuan region, experienced gang culture reflected in their music, as artists wrote about fights and vows of brotherhood. But most of today’s biggest artists no longer rap about topics like stabbing someone or drug use.

Wang Yitai, who was a member of the Chengdu rap collective CDC, is now one of China’s most popular rappers. His style infused mainstream pop sounds.

“We are all striving to create music that not only sounds good but also has themes that fit China,” says Wang. “I think the spirit of hip-hop will always be about original creation and it will always be about its own story.”