The Raising of Chinese Rap on Weibo
China doesn’t have the earth for Hip-hop culture.
The hip-hop culture stem from young black people who live in slum in early 1970s in America. The rap is the way for them to express their anger on inequity, racism, dissatisfaction on their current lives, and dreams on their future lives. And therefore, in their lyrics, it is usually about sex, money, drugs and violence, and sometimes it is against to the government. Due to Chinese culture and complicated history, all these elements are considered as low culture, and taking drugs is even an abominable illegal behavior.
Because of the First Opium War (1840–1842), Chinese government has the strictest laws and punishment on drugs, including soft drugs, like weeds and ice; All kinds of drugs are forbidden. If the celebrity is found that is suspected on taking drugs, it is huge blow on his or her dignity and career because Chinese audiences consider drug taking as an extreme wicked illegal behavior. Although American some rap stars come into China and become popular, like Eminem, rap music is still subcultural music in China. Nevertheless, this circumstance ended with a hot rap talent show called 中国有嘻哈（The Rap of China）.
The hits on this show was raising fast on weibo. Everybody was discussing, reposting, and posting things about this show and the rappers in this show. The hashtag of this show and the hashtag of rappers were always on the hot list of weibo and make this show become the hottest show at that time. Increasing amount of people are interested in rap music, and rappers got more and more teenage fans. Older fans who have listened to rap music and care about Chinese rap for a long time think those teenage fans are fake fans, teenage fans think it is crap, so these two groups of people always “diss” each other on weibo to figure out who is “real”, which brings this show another large amount of hits.
Large amount of hits in the very early period of this show is from four tutors that they invited: Chris Wu, Wilber Pan, MC Jin, and MC Hotdog&Chen-yue Chang (The last two tutors work as a group). MC Jin is Asian American and he is a very famous rapper in U.S but rare people knew him in China; MC Hotdog&Chen-yue Chang is famous band from Taiwan, and MC hotdog is a famous rapper, audience around 30-year-old listened to their music when they are in the college; Wilber Pan, people who are over 25 grew up with his songs; the last but not least, the hero for these huge hits, Chris Wu. He is an idol or called Hits Star. Hits Star is a group of stars that especially seen in China, they have good appearance, poor (or no) acting skills, poor (or no) acting skills and huge number of fans. The fans of an idol don’t care about these skills, but care about idol’s personalities, improvements, and appearance. Chris Wu has 30 million fans on weibo. (Just for comparison, the population of Korea is 51 million) Because he was going to be the tutor of this show, his fans spontaneously started to understand rap culture and propagandize it to others to make sure that their idol’s show will have a good audience rating.
