In 2018, the censors who oversee Chinese media issued a directive to the nation’s entertainment industry: Don’t feature artists with tattoos and those who represent hip-hop or any other subculture.

Right after that, well-known rapper GAI missed a gig on a popular singing competition despite a successful first appearance.

Speculation went wild, as fans worried that this was the end for hip-hop in China. Some media labelled it a ban.

Rap had just experienced a banner year in the country, with a hit competition-format TV show minting new stars and introducing them to a population of 1.4 billion people.

Rappers accustomed to operating on little money and performing in small bars became household names.

The announcement from censors came at the peak of that frenzy. A silence descended, and for months no rappers appeared on the dozens of variety shows and singing competitions on Chinese TV.

But by the end of that year, everything was back in full swing.

“Hip-hop was too popular,” says Nathanel Amar, a Chinese pop culture researcher at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China.

“They couldn’t censor the whole genre.”

What had looked like the end for Chinese hip-hop was just the beginning.

Roots in the western city of Chengdu

Since that moment, hip-hop’s explosive growth in China has only continued.

The genre has survived by carving out a space for itself while staying clear of the government’s red lines, balancing genuine creative expression with something palatable in a country with powerful censors.

Today, musicians say they’re looking forward to a potential golden age.

Much of the energy can be found in Chengdu, a city in China’s south-western Sichuan region.

Some of the biggest acts in China today hail from Sichuan; Wang Yitai, Higher Brothers and Vava are just a few of the names that have made Chinese rap mainstream, performing in a mix of Mandarin and Sichuan dialects.

While hip-hop in Chengdu started out with the very heavy sounds of trap, its mainstreaming has meant artists have broadened out to lighter sounds, from R&B to the trending Afro-beat rhythms popularised by Beyoncé.

Although Chinese rap has been operating 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’s a lot of rhymes in rap. And from a young age, we were exposed to language with a lot of rhymes. And I feel like we’re its origin,” says Mumu Xiang, who is from Sichuan and attended a rap concert recently held in the city.

The dialect lends itself to rap because it’s softer than Mandarin Chinese and there are a lot more rhymes, says 25-year-old rapper Kidway, from a town just outside Chengdu.

Chengdu is also welcoming to 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 has helped shape the scene and worked with Chengdu’s biggest acts.

Part of the city’s hip-hop lore centres 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 has embraced rap, as its originators like Boss X went from making music in run-down apartments to performing in a stadium for thousands.

At Boss X’s performance in March, fans sang along and cheered in Sichuanese. Even with a ban on the audience standing up — standard at all stadium performances in China — the energy was infectious.

He also got to collaborate with the Higher Brothers, one of the few Chinese rap groups who also have global recognition.

“The people here actually want each other to succeed,” he says.

The price of going mainstream, though, means the underground scene has evaporated.

Chengdu was once known for its underground rap battles. Those no longer happen, as freestyling usually involves profanity and other content the authorities deem unacceptable.

The last time there was a rap battle in the city, rappers say, authorities quickly showed up and shut it down.

These days it’s all digital, with people uploading short clips of their music to Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, to get noticed.

Kidway says he learned to rap from going to these battles and competing against other rappers his age. He once worked at a renovation company, but ditched it to pursue rap full time.

But even though the rap battles are gone, the field has more rappers than ever — and that’s a good thing.

“The more players there are,” he says, “the more interesting it is.”

A TV show that gave birth to a genre

Rarely can a single cultural product be said to have originated a whole genre of music. But the talent competition/reality TV show The Rap of China has played an outsized role in building China’s rap industry.

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

In the first season, the show relied on its judges’ star power to draw in an audience — namely Kris Wu, a Chinese-Canadian singer and former member of the hit K-pop group EXO.

At that point in time, Wu was at the height of his fame, and his comments as a judge that season even became internet memes.

“Do you have freestyle?” he asked a contestant, dead serious, on the first episode — a moment that went on to live in internet infamy because people doubted Wu’s rap credentials.

Two winners emerged from the first season: GAI and PG One.

Shortly after their win, the internet was awash with rumours about the less-than-perfect doings of PG One’s personal life. The Communist Youth League also criticised one of his old songs for content that appeared to be about using cocaine, very much violating one of the censor’s red lines.

Then came the 2018 meeting where censors reminded TV channels of who could not appear on their programs, namely anyone who represented hip-hop.

PG One was finding that any attempts to release new music were quickly taken down by platforms, and IQiyi even took down the entire first season of The Rap of China for a while.

But by late summer 2018, fans were excited to hear that they could expect a second season of the show — though there was to be a rebrand.

The name in English stayed the same, but in Chinese it signalled a new direction, changing from “China Has Hip-Hop” to “China Has Shuochang”, a term that also refers to traditional forms of storytelling.

Regulators had given the go-ahead for hip-hop to continue its growth, but they had to follow the lines set by the government censors. Hip-hop was now shuochang, and it had to stay away from mentions of drugs and sex.

Otherwise, though, it could proceed as a symbol of youth culture.

Finding a Chinese voice

With tight censorship on the entertainment industry and a ban on mentions of drugs and sex in lyrics, artists have reacted in two ways — either wholeheartedly embracing the displays of patriotism and nationalism, or avoiding the topics entirely.

Some, like GAI, have fully taken on the government’s mantle in the mainstreaming of hip-hop.

He won The Rap of China with a song called Not Friendly, in which, in classic hip-hop fashion, he dissed other rappers that he didn’t name.

“I’m not friendly. I can break your pen at any moment. Tear down your flashy words … My enemies, you better pray for you to have a good end.”

Just a few years later, Gai is singing about China’s glorious history on CCTV’s Spring Festival New Year’s Gala broadcast, a tightly scripted entertainment show with comedy sketches, songs and dance performances watched by families celebrating the Chinese New Year.

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

The red lines have also pushed artists to be more creative. For Chinese rap to thrive, artists have to find original voices, they say.

Thirty-two-year-old rapper Fulai describes his own music as chill rap, or “bedroom music” — not in the euphemistic sense, but the type of music you listen to as you lay in bed.

His upcoming album, he says, is about ordinary things like fights with his wife and washing dishes.

Still, Fulai says he talks about sex a lot in his lyrics, given Chinese is a language with countless sayings and a strong poetic tradition.

Developing a genuine Chinese brand of rap remains a work in progress.

Hip-hop got its start from New York’s boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, where rappers made music out of their tough circumstances, from shootouts to crime to illegal drug dealing.

In China, the challenge is about finding what fits its context. Shootouts are rare in a country where guns are banned, and the penalties for drug use are high.

The rap crews in Chongqing, another mega-city in the Sichuan region, had a taste of gang culture reflected in their music as artists wrote about fights and vows of brotherhood. But most of today’s biggest acts don’t rap about topics like knifing someone or drug use anymore.

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

“We’re all trying hard to create songs that not only sound good, but also topics that fit for China,” Wang says.

“I think hip-hop’s spirit will always be about original creation and will always be about your own story.”

AP