Hip hop with Chinese characteristics: the Communist Party plan to hook millenials
Youth league throws its weight behind popular patriotic acts to win over a generation growing disillusioned with life and career prospects
In his baseball cap and baggy yellow T-shirt, the rap star Li Yijie – better known by his stage name “Pissy” – is an unlikely face of China’s strait-laced ruling Communist Party.
His group, Tianfu Shibian, has won fans and the support of the party’s youth league with songs like Force of Red and This is China that chime with President Xi Jinping’s nationalist vision of China and its place in the world.
Under Xi, set to begin a second five-year term at a key party congress next month, the once-hidebound Communist Party has sought to revitalise its role in society amid challenges to its traditional authority as the country gets richer, more mobile and more digitally connected.
The party’s modernising push also comes as a significant number of educated Chinese millennials, faced with a tough job market and high housing costs in big cities, have grown disillusioned about their career and life prospects.
The party’s effort extends increasingly to co-opting swathes of Chinese popular culture, such as Tianfu Shibian. At the same time, the government is cracking down on online content and entertainment that strays beyond the narrowing definitions of what is acceptable.
If the party “sticks to the old ways, it will only be more and more rejected by young people”, said Li, 23, whose band’s name means “Tianfu Incident”. Tianfu refers to the region around Chengdu, the band’s home city in western Sichuan province.