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The Roots of Censorship in Chinese Hip-hop
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Chinese hip-hop has recently received extensive coverage in the international media. Dozens of articles, published everywhere from the BBC(2) to 'Express<3> to Time,<4> have attempted to explain the astonishing attempts by the Chinese authorities to censor Chinese rap following the genre's spectacular rise to prominence throughout the country's official media over the last few years. On 19 January 2018, a short dispatch from the Sina agency reported that Gao Changli (...), Director of Publicity for the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), announced that Chinese media were henceforth forbidden to invite guests such as tattooed artists (wenshen yiren ...) or representatives of hip-hop culture (xiha wenhua ...), sub-cultures (ya wenhua ...), or "dispirited culture" (sang wenhua Rxih).(5> In addition, guests invited to appear on Chinese media are obliged to follow a strict protocol and never "disagree with Party rules, use vulgar language, or display a low ideological level."(6) So what made the Chinese authorities decide to ban hip-hop from the national airwaves in the space of just a few weeks? Before we trace the origins of these events as reported by Chinese and international media, it is first necessary to retrace the history of hip-hop in China, from its birth in the "underground" to its recent commercial breakthrough, in order to better understand the contradictory methods of censorship employed by the Chinese authorities.
The birth of Chinese hip-hop in the musical "underground"
Like many countercultural movements in China, hip-hop took off during the 1990s thanks to the influx of dakou (...) tapes and CDs onto the black market in major Chinese cities. The term dakou (or "saw-gash") refers to unsold discs and cassettes that were sent to China by large Western companies for recycling. To prevent their sale on the black market, companies broke the edge of the CD in order to make it unplayable-oblivious to the fact that CDs play outwards from the centre to the edge, meaning that only the final track was unplayable (De Kloet 2010). In the mid-1990s, these CDs and cassettes were sold in massive quantities on the black market in large Chinese cities, breathing new life into an independent music scene...