Introduction by Krish Raghav

Last summer, the Guangdong-based rapper SKAI ISYOURGOD became the first Chinese artist to surpass Mandopop god Jay Chou in monthly Spotify streams. This divine diss capped an extraordinary, and complicated, near-decade for Chinese hip-hop – first banned, then courted, and now co-opted into state propaganda as a cornerstone of pop culture.

The turning point came in 2017. There was hip-hop in China before that, but the sensationally popular reality TV show The Rap of China (a near-clone of Korea’s Show Me the Money) changed the game, bringing a once-underground genre to nationwide attention and leading to a groundswell of rappers, producers and beatmakers.

In this excerpt from The Wall Dancers, Yi-Ling Liu shows us what that groundswell looked like in the south-west city of Chengdu, home to 20 million people, 237 pandas and many acclaimed rappers. We’re there, in that interval between the skittering pops of a trap beat, following Kafe Hu as he moves to the city, picks up the mic, and seeks his fame. We’re there as verses are spit, as moshpits heave, and as local enforcers burst through the club doors to stop the music NOW. Through Kafe’s eyes we see how a fringe “foreign influence” exploded in such a short time.

Liu offers a stage-side view of the genre’s development, showing how a local style was forged at underground shows and rap battles, combining menacing trap beats and smooth, atonal drawl. We meet the OGs, among them 老熊MOW and 谢帝 Xie Di (AKA Fat Shady). And when the first season of The Rap of China airs, we see how (and why) Chengdu produces many of its lodestars – Wang Yitai, Higher Brothers, Kafe himself.

There’s a tendency in writing about alternative music in China to consider scenes as cultural freezeframes, forever “emerging” or “flourishing”. In The Wall Dancers, the freezeframe flickers, then moves. Liu lets us feel the complex Chengdu backbeat that now pulses through all Chinese hip-hop. How it helped make rap in local dialect palatable to a national audience, breaking a broadcast taboo and arguably saving the genre from the rhythmic shackles of standard Mandarin. How the global ascendance of SKAI ISYOURGOD is entangled with Chengdu’s original rap crews – and beyond that, with the forum lurkers downloading Eminem mp3s in the hypnotic vastness of the early Chinese internet.

Like many aspiring Chinese rappers, Kafe Hu first got hooked on Eminem. One day in the early 2000s, outside a local shopping centre, his middle-school friends who were into breakdancing blasted “My Name Is”. Kafe was unimpressed by the dance moves, but the music was electric. He’d never heard anything like it before – the brash vocals, heavy bassline, in-your-face lyrics (“My English teacher wanted to flunk me in junior high … I smacked him in his face with an eraser / Chased him with a stapler”). Eminem was nothing like the rosy-cheeked Mandopop stars who choked the airwaves.

Kafe started spending afternoons at Mirage, his local internet cafe. In a small, smoke-filled room, he sat alongside other pubescent patrons who paid two kuai an hour to stare at blocky old computers, playing videogames and, when the cafe manager wasn’t looking, watching porn. The internet of the early 2000s was still chaotic and unruly – a teenage boy’s dream. But Kafe wasn’t there for first-person shooters or nudes: he was listening to hip-hop.

Kafe wanted his life to go faster. He wanted to bike faster, fall in love faster, get out of his hometown faster. Jiangyou, the city in Sichuan Province where he grew up, was slow and lethargic. His father owned a hotpot restaurant and a teahouse, and his stepmother took care of him and his stepbrother. They lived together in a low-rise home next to a string of funeral-rites shops. Tall and skinny, with hooded eyes and spiky hair that he’d later shave down to a buzz cut, he looked like his birth mother, whom he’d met only a handful of times. A heroin addict, she had passed away when he was a child.

School was stifling. Kafe felt suffocated by the conveyor-belt future ahead of him: get good grades, ace the gaokao, land a desk job, buy an apartment and find a respectable spouse, all within a short radius of where he lived. “The abide-by-authority DNA just wasn’t in me,” he said. “I didn’t want to wear what they wanted me to wear, to learn what they wanted me to learn, to feel like I was a machine, meeting a certain standard.” He dropped out of school and wandered around his hometown picking fights. His father once told him in a burst of frustration that he had only three paths in life: join the criminal underworld, end up in jail, or become a beggar.

Kafe discovered hip-hop just as he was looking for a way out. He immersed himself in Jay-Z and 50 Cent and trawled rap forums. He started writing his own verses, and stole 25 yuan from his dad to buy a mic and record his own tracks. A friend jokingly suggested the moniker Kafe Hu, meaning “Coffee Pot”: Hu was a homonym for the Chinese word for “pot”, while Kafe sounded sophisticated and French.

His first tracks were thrown together – freestyle riffs plugged into illegally downloaded beats, which he uploaded onto the music-sharing website 163888.net. People seemed to enjoy them. One of his songs – his lyrics set to the beat of Eminem’s “Stan” – impressed a singer and music producer in Chengdu named K-Bo, who was known at the time as the big sister of China’s rap scene. She connected him to a breakdance group in the city, who invited him to join as their MC.

Kafe had heard that Chengdu was a place where musicians could make a living from their art. If he stayed in Jiangyou, he was destined to become a nobody in an unknown town. “I wanted to go places. I wanted to move to a bigger city, wanted to become a big-city guy,” he said. “It was like my American dream, you know? Like how everybody in America wants to go to New York.” So, in 2005, aged 17, he packed his bags and, with 500 yuan in his pocket, hopped on a bus to Chengdu.

Hip-hop was one of the last genres of music to establish itself in China after the reforms of the 1980s opened the doors to Western culture. Listeners reared on straitlaced revolutionary anthems initially fell for the energetic pop of British duo Wham! and the country tunes of John Denver. University students began sporting John Lennon haircuts and belting out the throaty songs of Cui Jian, the godfather of Chinese rock. During the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, protestors in the square sang Cui’s most famous track, “Nothing to My Name”.

After the crackdown, Western music was once again tightly controlled. Cui Jian’s concerts were monitored, and in 1990 he was forced to cancel a national tour midway. As the commercial displaced the political, Mandopop and Cantopop from Taiwan and Hong Kong began to dominate the airwaves. The sweeter, more conflicted soft-rock ballads of the Hong Kong band Beyond became the soundtrack of the era, sung not on the streets but inside sparkling new karaoke bars. “Forgive me for loving freedom all my life,” the band croons on its hit “Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies”, “But I’m afraid of falling down one day.”

Foreign sounds eventually made their way in as contraband. Literally translated as “cut hole”, dakou were surplus recordings from the US, the UK and Japan, imported as recyclable plastic after large-scale trade took off in 1992. A dakou CD might have a small hole drilled through its outer rim, and a dakou tape might have an inch-long cut at the edge of its plastic case – but despite the minor damage, most of the tracks remained playable. Marked at customs as “foreign plastic trash”, the tapes were recovered by enterprising salesmen and resold in black markets.

Dakou granted listeners access to centuries’ worth of music – from Celine Dion to Finnish metal to Wagner. A shipment of 300,000 Madonna dakou albums sold out in a month. After Kurt Cobain committed suicide, the cost of Nirvana dakou tapes inflated from 5 to 80 yuan. The young people scoured dakou stores in search of forbidden melodies, copied and remixed them, creating new sounds of their own. They became known as “dakou youth”: an entire generation proudly named after recycled foreign trash.

The internet’s arrival in the mid-2000s rendered dakou obsolete, and mainstream pop flourished. In 2004, the Culture Ministry approved Britney Spears’s first tour of the country, so long as she “didn’t reveal too much”. (She scrapped the tours, citing exhaustion.) But dakou’s DIY spirit survived in a underground scene of punk rockers, metalheads and hip-hop artists. Iron Mic rap battles were held in the bars of Shanghai and Beijing. After the release of 8 Mile, the biographical film in which he acted, Eminem became immensely popular. “I didn’t understand English, but I loved the way he was talking. It was so fresh,” said Rita Fan, a hip-hop critic. “I could feel his anger, and I realised that music could be a channel to express these feelings.”

Rap crews soon formed across China. There was C-Block from Changsha, No Fear from Wuhan, CHAOS from Xi’an, Uranu$ from Guangzhou, GO$h from Chongqing. These were hyperlocal scenes, each shaped by their region’s dialect, slang and culture. Fans became wangyou, or “net friends”, with one another through the rap forum hiphop.cn and the social media platform Douban.

Insulated from the political authority of the east coast, Chengdu has historically served as a refuge for misfits, radicals and exiled intellectuals. The eighth-century poets Li Bai and Du Fu, two of China’s greatest, spent chunks of their careers there. (Kafe would later often weave Li Bai’s poetry into his lyrics.) A distinct identity has flourished in the Sichuanese basin: laid-back and epicurean, but also stubborn and resilient.

In Chengdu, Kafe Hu lived on his own terms. He got by on a few hundred yuan from each breakdance MC gig, just enough for food and a skimpy mattress on the balcony of an apartment. He frequented the dakou stores, too, getting the albums that everyone else was listening to: 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Linkin Park. He got stoned during the day and performed on sidewalks in the evening. His friends would often shake him awake in the middle of the night, double-fisting Red Bulls, yelling, “Get up, Kafe! It’s time to make music!”

Kafe soon left the breakdance crew to work at Hemp House, a perpetually smoky reggae bar. He continued writing songs, filling notebook after notebook with lyrics. Teaching himself how to use Photoshop, he made Hemp House’s posters and started a side hustle as a graphic designer. The bar hosted a diverse lineup of global musicians, from jazz guitarists to grunge bands to Charlie Moseley, a DJ from Washington, DC, who would become Kafe’s best friend and roommate.

Charlie admired Kafe’s cool baritone and effortless swagger; Kafe was impressed by Charlie’s encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop. He introduced Kafe to leftfield artists like Mos Def and Flying Lotus, and taught him how to sample old jazz records. “I was, like, wow,” Kafe told me. “Hip-hop can sound like this?” It taught him the value of authenticity. “Walk into a hip-hop concert [in China], and everyone would be wearing jean shorts sagged to their ankles and massive Mets jerseys, because the big act at the time was 50 Cent,” said Charlie. “But Kafe understood that you didn’t need a hip-hop starter pack to be an artist. You could stay in your own lane.”

By 2008, Kafe had found other like-minded rappers in the city: Fat Shady, Mow, Lil Bai, Sleepy Cat and Ansr J. Young people crowded into Chengdu Little Bar to watch the artists roll in from their day jobs, still dressed in their office clothes, to take part in rap battles. In contrast to the Beijing scene, which took on a grungier sound and a punk ethos, hip-hop in Chengdu was more playful, with trap beats and irreverent lyrics.

In April 2008, shortly before the Olympics, a rap track with a starkly different ethos went viral on the Chinese internet. Titled “Don’t Be Like CNN” and set against the beat of Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time”, its lyrics went: “Don’t be like CNN / Western media like bullshitting… You are fucking idiots compared to us.” The song appeared on anti-cnn.com, a website launched by the 23-year-old Tsinghua University graduate Rao Jin in response to Western coverage of protests in Tibet, which Rao accused of relying on fake photos and biased reporting.

Rao belonged to a group of young nationalists known as fenqing, or “angry youths”, who lashed out at perceived slights to their nation’s honour. Educated and tech-savvy, they had grown up in the 1990s, after the Party had launched a “patriotic education campaign” to instil a sense of national pride in its youth. But in Chengdu, far from the political centre, Kafe was insulated from their passions. When Olympics ads flooded the streets and Games footage aired nonstop in packed clubs and bars, he didn’t pay much attention. “I didn’t care much about the Games,” Kafe would tell me more than a decade later. “All I cared about was how I would become a famous rapper.”

So his learning continued. He expanded his repertoire to include electronic music, jazz and reggae, and learned how to beatbox. Charlie and he moved into a cramped apartment where they played Call of Duty until dawn, raised a cat called GreenBean, and smoked weed from a two-foot-tall glass bong. They collaborated on silly songs, like one called “Have Money Daddy”. They vacationed in Dali in Yunnan, driving rented mopeds around Erhai Lake while tripping on acid. One summer night, back at the Hemp House, the bar got so hot, and the stage so packed with young people cheering a rap battle, that all the light bulbs exploded.

By the 2010s, as hundreds of billions of dollars were pumped into the region, Chengdu had been transformed into a commercial hub, a shopping mecca and the source of two-thirds of the world’s iPads. All around, one could find signs of its raging adolescence: stoic office buildings that hosted hip-hop bashes after hours, glitzy malls where nocturnal fight clubs raged.

Even so, Chengdu hip-hop remained playful and provocative. Instead of Mandarin, the language of school and national television, locals rapped in Sichuanese, rich with rising and falling tones, which allowed for greater lyrical experimentation. The city’s vibe was perhaps best captured by Fat Shady in “Daddy, I’m Not Going to Work Tomorrow”: “Daddy ain’t going to work tomorrow, I’ll rage all night / Daddy ain’t going to work tomorrow, so I can live a little more truthfully.” The track was so popular that, in 2014, he was invited to perform a toned-down version of it on stage for the state-run China Central Television (CCTV). Still, in front of a cheering crowd and a row of speechless, suited-up commentators, he railed against traffic jams and office sycophants. So that he could sleep in, he told his alarm clock “to go fuck itself”.

Kafe’s own career was picking up. In two albums released within three years, he had established a distinct style. He mixed old-school hip-hop beats with jazz inflections, gravitated toward obscure and darkly humorous lyrics, and rapped with a low, husky tenor and a relaxed swing to his delivery. His second album, 27: The Code of Lucifer (2016), drew inspiration from the story of the archangel, which he first learned from a book on Western art history. He was fascinated by the idea that Lucifer was a countercultural spirit.

The internet was the key driver of hip-hop’s popularity in China. In contrast to the US, where the industry had more established gatekeepers – major music labels, bloggers, Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat – Chinese listeners discovered new music primarily through social media: WeChat, QQMusic and Douban. On these platforms, unknown artists could spread quickly, without publicists or managers.

In 2016, VICE China organised a “Motherland Tour”, inviting Chinese-born musicians from around the world to return home and experience its music scene. Bohan Phoenix, one of the artists who participated – born in Hubei, raised in Boston and living in New York City – was impressed by what he heard. He met Kafe and an upcoming four-man group called the Higher Brothers. Their leader, Masiwei, with his sunken cheeks, dreadlocks and raspy drawl, was the antithesis of a traditional Chinese pop star. (The group was named after Haier, one of China’s most popular home-appliances manufacturers.)

More than anything, Bohan was amazed by the hunger in China – the ravenous appetite – for new music, new culture. The first time he performed there, the crowd was so wild that he lost his voice. “I didn’t know that kids in China were into hip-hop like this. Me and my bros went so hard last night,” he told me. “When we got back to the Airbnb, I was like – China is lit, right?” He would eventually move to Chengdu.

The next summer, Chinese hip-hop was propelled to the mainstream by The Rap of China, a reality TV competition. The show went viral straight after its debut in June, racking up 1.3 billion views in a month. Underground rappers like Vava and Tizzy T became major stars overnight, their performance fees increasing tenfold in a few weeks. “Do you freestyle?” became an online catchphrase, thanks to the show’s celebrity judge, the K-pop star Kris Wu. The show’s slogan, R!CH, which stood for Rising! Chinese Hip-Hop, was registered by iQiYi as a trademark and street brand name, and printed on hats, shirts and phone cases.

Kafe Hu found himself swept up in all the attention. He was in high demand, invited to perform across the country and to collaborate with fashion brands. Foreign reporters showed up at his doorstep asking for interviews – wanting to know his story, how many listeners he had, how much money he made. He signed with one of China’s preeminent record labels, Modern Sky. For the first time, he could make music full-time without worrying about money for food.

It was only a matter of time until the Party came for hip-hop. Much like an out-of-touch parent trying to keep up with the younger generation, it tried to co-opt its people’s tastes as its own. In 2016, the state news outlet Xinhua released a cartoon music video about the “Four Comprehensives”, the Party’s long-term development plan, featuring a middle-aged man and a little girl dancing to a hip-hop soundtrack with verses such as “It’s everyone’s dream to build a moderately prosperous society comprehensively.” Netizens were unimpressed.

Direct methods of punishment also initially flopped. In 2015, the Ministry of Culture blacklisted 120 songs that “threatened public morality”, scrubbing them from streaming sites, concert halls and karaoke parlours. Most came from Beijing’s hip-hop underground, including 17 songs by In3, one of city’s first groups. (Other forbidden tracks such include “No Money No Friend”, “Don’t Want to Go to School”, “I Love Taiwanese Girls” and “Fart”.) Contrary to the ministry’s intentions, the songs’ popularity skyrocketed. “Thank you, Ministry, for the recommendations,” one Weibo user commented.

Then, on 19 January 2018, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television – the country’s top media regulator – announced legislation forbidding TV programmes from depicting hip-hop culture. Rappers’ faces were crudely blurred in advertisements, concerts were hastily cancelled, and the songs of PG One, winner of The Rap of China, were removed from streaming platforms.

PG One went silent before resurfacing with a Weibo post: “I will add more positive energy in my music works and serve as a better model for my fans.” GAI, the other Rap of China victor, launched his own redemption campaign, leading chants of “Long Live the Motherland!” on national television during a tryout performance for CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala. An article in the state-run Global Times declared that China hopes local hip-hop, if “properly guided and purified” can be turned into “a positive influence”.

Beyond the most visible victims, however, the ban was ambiguously enforced. I arrived in Chengdu a couple of months later to find that most hip-hop artists continued to make music, albeit more cautiously. Most reacted in classic Chengdu fashion when I asked them about the ban: they shrugged it off. At worst it was a nuisance, and an ineffective one, given that it applied only to television. When I mentioned GAI, they wrinkled their noses. But there was also a sense that coolness had to make way for survival. “GAI’s smart,” said a Chengdu-based rapper called TSP. “He flipped a switch and decided to be a good boy.”

I met Kafe for the first time during that trip, at his friend’s recording studio in the basement of a shopping mall called 339. He had a patchwork of tattoos across the length of each arm: a half-finished dragon, a lion’s head (modelled after the lion statues outside the Hemp House bar), a red Illuminati symbol (just for fun) and the word “Lucifer” spelled out in Morse code.

He seemed similarly unfazed by the ban. There were plenty of things to rap about that did not fall into the categories of contrarian dissent or commodity capitalism. His most popular track, “Hope and Reality”, explicitly criticised the government and had recently been censored, but he continued to perform it live. (“I hope you can breathe the air / I hope you can speak freely”.) His new work would be less confrontational, he said, addressing issues like discrimination against unmarried women.

The previous year, Kafe had released his most experimental album to date: Kafreeman, titled after his newborn son, Freeman. It featured a full jazz band and did not use any beats or samples. The lyrics were obtuse and introspective; his delivery was cool and unhurried. The album was released in three parts; the covers each bore a pop art-esque photo of the boy in a different colour: red, yellow and blue. Some fans speculated online that the colours were a subtle critique of a recent abuse case that blew up in Beijing at a kindergarten run by massive private company called RYB (Red Yellow Blue) Education. The incident became a national scandal. Perhaps, as a new father, Kafe wanted to express his outrage, too? “I didn’t say anything explicitly,” he told me with a sly grin, eyes twinkling with mischief. “But I’m not going to correct them.”

He was ambivalent about Chinese hip-hop’s newfound attention, and had tried to shy away from it. Kafreeman was lauded by critics, but the album wasn’t a smash hit, and he seemed to like it that way. On stage, he was almost disdainful of the idea of having a massive fandom, and liked to engage in casual banter with his audience; a few years later, I would watch him perform in Beijing and call out overeager fans. “Who came early and lined up for the concert? And who came late?” he asked the crowd. “Late folks, I respect you. I’m fat and dark – it’s not worth lining up for someone like me.” In some ways, he argued, the hip-hop ban allowed the subculture time to mature organically without the frenzy of commercialisation. “The artists who were never really interested in hip-hop in the first place will move on,” Kafe said. “And those who really love the art form will stick around.”

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps the ban was no big deal – another slap on the wrist to keep in check a subculture that had garnered too much attention. Or perhaps the nonchalance of all the artists I had met was a survival mechanism they had developed over the years in the face of the censor, founded on the belief that they could always make music with a bit of grit and good humour. Instead of complaining about the constraints of the Great Firewall, they laughed them off. In the song “WeChat”, the Higher Brothers both ironically and earnestly praise the app: “There’s no Skype, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram / We use WeChat, yeah.”

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the ban was but one tremor in a broader tectonic shift. One evening during my trip to Chengdu I went to a building called the Poly Center, in search of its storied hip-hop raves, only to find that the party was over. When the elevator opened on to the 21st floor, the corridors were silent and empty. The walls were peeling, and the door to the defunct NASA hip-hop club was off its hinges.

At Poly Center’s peak, the queue would snake out of the building for several blocks. When he first moved to Chengdu, the Tibetan rapper Young13DBaby told me, he rented a cheap Airbnb in the basement of the building for an entire week. Every night he made the 21-flight pilgrimage and danced till dawn. Now all that was left was one techno club, where stragglers bopped their heads to wordless beats. Electronic music was much more resilient than hip-hop to shifting regulatory tides, a local music producer told me, because it rarely used lyrics. “Think about East Germany when the Berlin Wall was still up,” he said. “Why do you think there was only great techno at the time?”

I couldn’t get a straight answer about why the clubs had disappeared. Perhaps it was something to do with drug use. Perhaps they were too rowdy and the city wanted to “purify” the gentrifying district of its negative energy. Perhaps the government was exerting its control over a subculture it didn’t understand. When I came back one night, hoping to stumble into some sort of Poly Center revival, the guard in the lobby looked incredulous. I asked him why they’d shut the parties down. “Who knows?” he asked, in a way that sounded more like “Who cares?”

When I met up with Kafe in March 2021, the nationalist cacophony was deafening. Chinese consumers were calling for a boycott of brands including Nike, Adidas and H&M, which had accused China of using forced labour in Xinjiang’s cotton industry. Ride-hailing companies wiped these brands off their app interfaces. Celebrities, eager to pay their speech tax, declared that they were ending partnerships with brands accused of “smearing” China. H&M’s revenue in the country fell by 40 percent. Shares in domestic sportswear brands such as Li-Ning and ANTA, which proudly used Xinjiang cotton, doubled in value within months.

By then, Kafe had moved back to Jiangyou. The sleepy city he was so desperate to leave now felt like a refuge from the swirl of commercialism and geopolitics. I was struck by how quiet Jiangyou was, its streets devoid of working-age adults. As in many rural towns and third-tier cities across China, young people had gone elsewhere in search of better opportunities, leaving behind the children and the elderly. Jiangyou was too small to be worth the attention of foreign brands: at the time, there was no McDonald’s and no Starbucks, just a smattering of tea shops, hotpot restaurants and a sneaker store called Old Beijing.

This was a welcome change for Kafe, who was no longer enamoured of fame. Although in Jiangyou he stuck out like a sore thumb – unusually tall, tan and with stylish urban clothes – he rarely encountered hip-hop fans, and was largely left alone. There were no parties to chase and no speech tax to pay, he told me, as we sat in his grandmother’s apartment by the river. It was a classic elderly Chinese couple’s living room, cluttered with trinkets and trays of biscuits and watermelon seeds. His grandmother sat on a cracked leather couch watching a soap opera. Kafe’s father swung by, dressed head to toe in Nike – tracksuit, T-shirt, sneakers – seemingly unaware of the boycotts. “Look at this guy,” Kafe remarked. “He doesn’t have to give a shit about what he wears at all.”

Kafe still had to. He’d stopped wearing his Nike high-tops onstage. A year earlier, he’d joined the fourth season of The Rap of China as a contestant, agreeing to provide pretaped recordings of his performances, perform in long sleeves to cover his tattoos, and censor out lyrics deemed too sensitive. (One of his verses, “get some RMB into my hands”, was swapped for “get some time into my hands”, to avoid “wealth flaunting”.) He harboured no artistic illusions about the show. It was not a calling, but a job – a low-stakes, low-reward way to pay his bills. “I am no longer only responsible for myself, like before,” he told me. “Now I need to make money and raise my son.”

Kafe had married his girlfriend when he became a father in 2017, but separated from her shortly after. Now his son lived with his ex-wife in Neijiang, a city a couple hours away by train, and Kafe visited him every other week. Although marriage was underwhelming, fatherhood was transformative – the “biggest turning point in my life”, he said. It made him pragmatic and stripped him of his ego and his desire for fame and recognition – but also his idealism, his belief that music could challenge the status quo. Kafe once aspired to be like Kendrick Lamar, who was commercially popular but also spoke truth to power. That would no longer be possible. “China probably has 10,000 artists who could be as influential as Kendrick Lamar, but none of them will ever reach their full potential,” he said. “Real hip-hop is sung by those who are truly suffering, by those who are marginalised, by ethnic and racial minorities. Do you think those people would dare to speak out now?”

In the afternoon, I accompanied Kafe to the hospital for a doctor’s appointment. For more than a year, he’d been afflicted with tinnitus, a ceaseless ringing in his left ear. I sat in the waiting area as the doctor poked around Kafe’s ears with an otoscope. Five minutes later, he emerged with a prescription for sleeping aids and a vague diagnosis.

“Probably anxiety or depression or something,” Kafe shrugged.

The tinnitus was just one of the ways his body had been acting up. Lately there had been a strange out-of-body sensation, as if he were dreaming in the middle of the day, untethered to reality. It hit him once while he was onstage for The Rap of China. “I was onstage, freaking out, thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Then I took some deep breaths and it passed.”

It sounded to me like the symptoms of a depersonalisation disorder – the feeling of being detached from one’s own body, like an observer watching oneself from a distance. As Kafe described his symptoms, I couldn’t help but recall something I had once been told: that many artists in China lived with a split mind, constantly juggling personas, playing roles, concealing their private selves behind a public mask. How did the body respond to an environment that curtailed the expression of one’s authentic self?

We left for his apartment, a newly built two-bedroom 20 minutes away from his grandparents. It also served as his recording studio. One shelf by the entrance boasted rows of Nike high-tops, collecting dust. Another shelf displayed a handful of books – an Adele biography, a translation of Nietzsche.

He’d just got some new speakers, so I asked him to play his favourite track. He chose his song “Far”, a fast-paced mumble set against a synth beat, a jazzy saxophone and a woman’s eerie falsetto. The lyrics painted a scene of him wandering through Chengdu’s streets at night, walking past the white Mao statue in the city centre. He compares the city to a spider web that traps its prey and consumes them. Another line went: “Tonight, the lights in my studio shine / More brightly than the five-pointed red star.”

“Far” was one of his most critical songs, he said. It was unlike his banned track “Hope and Reality”, which explicitly dug into problems like corruption and air pollution. Nor was it like his more recent crowd favourite, “Economy Class”, a pick-me-up for those falling down the ladder of social mobility (“Phones that won’t connect, signals lost in the clouds / Aspire to be a better person, even when you’re in economy class”). “Far” was one of his least popular songs, because nobody – neither censors nor listeners – had really picked up on what it meant (“You know which five-pointed red star I’m referring to?”).

As space to dance has shrunk, artists like Kafe were faced with a choice: to accept their shackles and perform their loyalty, or to keep quiet – to lie low, write obscured lyrics, sing quiet songs for a small audience. If music couldn’t serve as the vehicle of social change, it could at least be a hidden transcript and a cathartic valve – a way to project feelings of suffocation onto the cityscape, an expression of private pain rather than public protest. “I’ve realised that I absolutely cannot change the world,” he said. “All I can do is work on myself.”

Click here for a playlist of Chinese hip-hop curated by Yi-Ling Liu.