The rise and fall of Li Zhi: China’s subversive folk rebel
Gaining a dedicated following 2004's The Forbidden Game, folk rock singer Li Zhi has battled the Chinese Communist Party's regime with his subversive songs.
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Wikimedia)
Music » Features
Wed 22 January 2025 22:00, UK
Before the online tech giant’s 2010 Chinese departure, a Google search of Tiananmen Square would reveal postcard shots of Beijing’s popular plaza, neat, inoffensive pictures of little more than the nation’s five-star Red Flag fluttering slightly ahead of the giant portrait of the People’s Republic of China founder Mao Zedong above the entrance to the 15th Century former imperial palace. The square’s Baidu Baike page, the Chinese version of Wikipedia, details the tourist spot’s most notable event of the late 1980s as light renovations of its distinct tower.
During the lead-up to every June 4th, the Chinese authorities ramp up the online and media censorship of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, scrubbing away ‘Tank Man’ and all of the defining images so engrained in the Western popular consciousness. Emboldened by the liberal and nationalist movements sweeping across the Eastern Bloc and triggered by the death of former General Secretary and reformist Hu Yaobang, the ensuing student-led, pro-democracy demonstrations across the summer of 1989 resulted in hundreds if not thousands dead, and a paranoid regime on hair-trigger alert to any slight dissent, only becoming more authoritarian with current leader Xi Jinping’s centralisation of powers.
One of the many targets of the Chinese Communist Party’s censorious crosshairs is Changzhou folk singer Li Zhi. Inspired to pick up the guitar by Pink Floyd and Mandopop artist Luo Dayou, Li abandoned his university studies to pursue a music career in 1999 and crafted lyrically rootsy ballads exploring his professed “small town” identity.
Born in 1978 in the south’s Jintan District but making a name for himself in nearby Nanjing, Li was of a generation that grew up amid China’s rapid yet uneven urbanisation programme. “During the early 1990s in my small town, my middle school was extremely chaotic,” Li confessed in a 2015 interview on Guangdong local TV. “My parents were illiterate or semi-illiterate, the whole town did not have any extracurricular books …”
Knowing firsthand the regional disparities in regeneration wrought by Deng Xiaoping’s ‘common prosperity’ policy, Li sought to wield what artistic influence he had and resisted the pull of China’s mega metropolises and focused a series of live dates on the country’s many forgotten small towns subsumed as environs to the major cities’ rapacious urban sprawl. Announcing his 12-year touring project 334 in February 2019, Li was set to play dates at all prefecture-level cities in China. Scheduled to play 23 dates in Sichuan and posting cheery photos of Li’s road crew en route on his official Weibo, the region’s Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism abruptly announced the planned gigs’ cancellation, citing “improper conduct” and refunding 18,000 tickets.
It got worse. As devastated fans were still reeling from the tour’s quashing, Li’s music was suddenly absent from China’s music sites across QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, and Douban Albums, and his Weibo and WeChat social media subject to heavy restrictions. What transgressions had Li committed to find himself on the zealous end of the CCP’s repressive bludgeon?
Despite Li’s team issuing a statement that he was unwell, supported by a picture of Li attached to an IV, the upcoming timing of Tiananmen Square’s 30th anniversary raised suspicions. His history of subtly subversive songs hadn’t gone unnoticed by the CCP top brass. Nervous that the 2019 three-decade milestone would puncture the enforced amnesia surrounding 1989’s massacre, it’s widely believed that the single-party state took no chances and thwarted any chance Li would play ‘Square’, ‘Goddess’ (referencing the papier-mâché liberty statue erected during the protests), and the satirical ‘The People Don’t Need Freedom’. In a courageous gesture of solidarity, his fans sported t-shirts emblazoned with “improper conduct”.
From a regime that’s erased Winnie the Pooh from all media presence due to the tubby bear’s perceived, memeable likeness to the thin-skinned Jinping, China’s music community hasn’t held its breath for a suspension of Li’s performance blackout anytime soon, but with a surprise five date Japan run as part of his Three Missing One mini-tour selling out in March last year, Li’s provocative and politically probing folk rock may be embarking on a new chapter of creative renewal, his late-career distance from his native China only sharpening his aim and lyrical attack on the CCP’s oppressive absurdities.
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