Communist rappers are luring young disgruntled Chinese
The party’s youth wing is growing inside companies
To mark china’s National Day on October 1st the Communist Youth League sent a message to its nearly 18m followers on Weibo, a microblog platform. “Today, as protagonists of this era, we will write new legends on this sacred land!” it proclaimed. Attached was a music video, its lyrics suffused with patriotic rhetoric and interspersed with clips of speeches by Mao Zedong and the country’s current leader, Xi Jinping. So far, so predictable. The surprise was the singer and his style: a rapper whose early songs about drugs and violence were deemed unfit for public airing. gai, as he is known, has turned a new leaf. He is now the league’s mc.
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This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “The young and the nationalist”
From the October 7th 2023 edition
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