Queerness within Chineseness: nationalism and sexual morality on and off the competition show The Rap of China

ABSTRACT

This research inspects the media and public discourses surrounding the first season of the sensational Chinese reality TV rap competition, The Rap of China (iQiyi, 2017). Through the combined theoretical lenses of queer China studies and global media studies, I examine the show’s framing of linguistic, geocultural, gender and sexual variations in its construction of a nationalistic imaginary alongside China’s media and cultural globalization. I reveal a revised fantasy of ‘authentic Chineseness’ projected by the competition. I then offer a careful reading of the post-competition sexual scandal and the government’s 2018 crackdown on Chinese hip-hop. I consider the official criticism and censorship of Chinese rap as the government’s response to the public cultural panic over the threat to China’s hetero-patriarchal-structured sexual morality. I show that a self-contradictory imaginary of a globalized, modernized and diversified ‘Sinophone’ community located within mainland China was created and positioned at the party-state’s moral and cultural centre. In this imaginary, nonnormative cultures, identities, languages and forms of intimacy, which have often been ostracized or degraded in the linguistic, geopolitical and conjugal paradigms of mainstream Chinese culture, are enabled to negotiate a place within official culture and mass media, though often in limited and problematic ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese rap
• Chineseness
• male homosociality
• sexual morality
• nationalism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Alvin Wong, Eve Ng, Hui (Faye) Xiao, Gina Marchetti and Wing-Fai Leung for their persuasion and great support for this project. My gratitude also goes to the two anonymous reviewers who provided immensely helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article. I also thank Yiwen Zhong and Liang Ge, who generously shared their wide knowledge about Chinese rap with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Communist Youth League is a political organization run by the Chinese Communist Party. The All-China Women’s Federation is the official women’s rights organization led by the party-state.

2. This negotiation of the position of Cantonese in the imaginary of ‘Chineseness’ by Au-Yeung was nothing new. As early as in 2003 in the U.S., he released the English-Cantonese rap song, ‘Learn Chinese’, in which he referred to himself as a ‘Chinaman’ and Cantonese as ‘Chinese’. Yet, this earlier practice can be a Sinophone marketing strategy, which challenges both Mandarin-speaking China-centrism and the cultural-linguistic hegemony of the dominant Anglophone rap industry.

3. The second season of TRC successfully passed the censors in late spring of 2018 by promising to promote ‘politically correct’ values and role models, as well as ‘greater internationalization [and diversification] of judges and contestants’ (Flew, Ryan, and Su 2019, 103).

4. https://kknews.cc/fashion/6p49l9 m.html

5. See, for example, a queer fan video uploaded to Bilibili.com in July 2017 and viewed over 264 thousand times: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av12672502?from=search&seid=8673565131394061325.

6. The original post was deleted. Some screen captures have been widely circulated through popular media coverage and commentaries. See: https://www.sohu.com/a/214183721_100097280

7. https://www.sohu.com/a/214183721_100097280

8. https://www.sohu.com/a/214471124_100038853

9. http://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id = 1,589,287,432,341,167,041 and http://www.365j.com/ylfx/136054.html

10. This point is also supported by Jia’s response to his bisexual rumour in November 2018. See media reports on the rumour at: https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20181128A0D4IC.

11. https://www.weibo.com/3937348351/FCO4auXuV?from=page_1001063937348351_profile&wvr=6&mod=weibotime&type=comment#_rnd1518432363965.

12. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/32,648,807?from_voters_page = true.

13. See the two commentaries at: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1083843.shtml and http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1083903.shtml.

14. https://new.qq.com/omn/20,180,108/20180108A0ZQ8 J.html.

15. http://ent.sina.com.cn/s/m/2018-03-28/doc-ifysqfni0075424.shtml

16. See screen captures of the post at: https://radiichina.com/controversial-rapper-pg-one-returns-kind-of/.

17. https://www.weibo.com/p/1004061875781361/home?from=page_100406_profile&wvr=6&mod=data&is_hot=1#place.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jamie J. Zhao

Jamie J. Zhao is currently Assistant Professor of Communications in the Department of Media and Communication at the Sino-UK collaborative institution, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and has received another Ph.D. in Film and TV Studies from the University of Warwick. Her works explore East Asian media and public discourses on gender and sexuality in a globalist age. Her academic writings can be found in a number of journals and edited volumes, such as Feminist Media Studies and Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (HKUP, 2017).