The Nu China music scene is breaking through the firewall

Taken from the summer 25 print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

Billionhappy is wearing a white snapback over a bandana, flipped backwards to eight o’clock. He twists the cap round to show me the front, which features a single character – ​“屌” – across the centre. Pronounced ​“diu”, it’s a classic Cantonese profanity, which is being adopted by mainland Chinese youth. ​“It means ​‘sick’, and it also means ​‘dick’,” the singer-rapper explains in English over a video call. ​“But in China, the two words actually have the same meaning: you’d say ​‘that’s dick’ to mean ​‘that’s sick’. And it’s funny, that’s also the name of my next record.”

Subversive humour is typical of Nu China: a wave of musicians experimenting with rap, pop and hyperactive club music, of which Billionhappy is a key member. The new EP, Diǎo, features Mandarin lyrics and sonics that move and screech between sugary hyperpop, dissonant hip-hop and even donk. It has a maximalist, fun-first style that has become a Nu China trademark, and is released via Eastern Margins, a UK-based record label and event series promoting alternative East and Southeast Asian artists.

The Nu China scene also includes Billionhappy’s housemate, the rapper Chalky Wong, as well as alt R&B singer Shushu, queer club DJ and producer hainafromchina and industrial experimentalist Shoddy, all of whom have gathered in Billionhappy and Chalky’s three-storey villa in the Qingpu District on the outskirts of Shanghai for THE FACE’s photoshoot.

The house is a DIY creative headquarters for Chalky and Billionhappy, who speaks while sitting in front of a whiteboard, on which tour ideas are mapped out and release schedules jotted down. ​“We removed all the beds and sofas and custom-made some chairs and tables and stuff. It’s kinda cheap to do DIY furniture in China,” Billionhappy says. ​“And I did some paintings in my room.” Across the house, there are also oddball trinkets including anime figurines and a mannequin head.

The seeds of Nu China were sown around a decade ago by pioneering leftfield club crews Genome 6.66 Mbp and SVBKVLT, who were some of the earliest proponents of deconstructed, weirdo electronic music in the country. But unlike those trailblazing collectives, whose music and scenes were primarily borne out of Beijing and central Shanghai – China’s biggest and, traditionally, most culturally thriving metropolises – these younger artists grew up in emerging modern supercities such as Shenzhen (Shushu), as well as regional ​“second and third tier” cities such as Guizhou (Shoddy) and Nanchong (hainafromchina).

Billionhappy himself grew up in Huainan, a city of more than three million in China’s central Anhui province. He was first drawn to the mic after coming across the ethereal cloud rap of Sweden’s Drain Gang crew, but only really began to push his music into weirder territory after coming across Genome 6.66 Mbp, who first ​“let me feel that Chinese people can write songs like that”. Having hung out with ​“local Chinese mafia types” during his teenage years, he faced a culture shock when he moved to London for university, where he was surrounded by affluent, new-money kids from the big cities.

“I went to UAL [University of the Arts London]to learn fashion,” he says. ​“But all my Chinese classmates were from Shanghai and Beijing, and itwas only me from a small city. Shanghai is a beautiful city, but if you go to regional China, it’s different. I’ve got the local Chinese culture in my body.”

There are references to the melancholy of life on the Chinese margins littered throughout Billionhappy’s output. His 2023 song GuiHuo鬼火(Ghost Fire), which includes a Chalky Wong verse, uses the vernacular term for a moped: an ever-present vehicle for zipping through smaller Chinese cities and suburbia. A recent remix of his track 中国人不在中国(Chinese Person Not in China) – featuring London-Shanghai producer and singer Organ Tapes and rising Chinese cloud rapper Jackzebra – opens with a sample from a documentary about Shamate, a mid-2000s rural Chinese youth subculture that featured side-fringe-heavy, gelled-up, coloured hair similar to emos and scene kids.

The music video for Chalky Wong’s new track Regular Rappers, which was directed by Billionhappy, was filmed in Anhui. The clip takes viewers into dark alleyways, Brutalist concrete high rises and courtyards surrounded by identikit apartments. Over a menacing beat by Playboi Carti producer F1lthy, Chalky crescendoes into a demonic laugh to conclude the song’s hook. Regular Rappers is a dig at China’s mainstream hip-hop scene, which is led by artists from Beijing and Shanghai who would probably never set foot in Anhui. ​“Ninety per cent of Chinese rappers, they do the same shit, you know?” says Chalky. ​“They steal flows from foreigners and think that because of the firewall they can steal it and try to cheat the Chinese people.”

The firewall, which limits access to certain sections of the internet outside of China – including Instagram, YouTube and Google – has been seen as a barrier to cultural exchange and influence with the outside world. But these days, the vast majority of young Chinese people are tech-savvy, employing simple VPNs to access the entirety of the World Wide Web (every artist I interviewed for this article dialled into a Google Meet video call using a VPN). VPNs are not explicitly banned by the Chinese authorities (although access is limited to ones that are regulated by the government), and this means that the ​“Great Firewall” is barely a low fence. It also means that more discerning Chinese listeners can tell when an artist has imaginatively flipped styles they’ve learned from a Western act, or – as is allegedly the case with Chalky Wong’s mainstream adversaries – simply bitten flows from American rappers.

After China opened itself up to global economic investment at the end of the 20^th century, cultural influences from capitalist countries gradually trickled in. Now, with a chronically online generation evading the firewall and then promoting their art on social media sites such as WeChat and Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), the speed of cultural exchange has become dizzying. DJ and producer hainafromchina, whose heady club sets can range anywhere from baile funk heaters to sino trance edits, argues that this is producing interesting fusions, both in music and fashion.

“People are smart enough to get a VPN and kids nowadays can dig deeper on the internet than we could ever imagine,” she says. ​“Chinese youth culture takes influences from everything that young people see on the internet. You can see all kinds of culture embodied into one person, like Harajuku [Tokyo’s youth culture epicentre], Korean makeup, visual kei, ABGs [Asian Baby Girls], or even BBLs.”

You can hear Western influences in the music of all the Nu China artists. Chalky Wong dived into rap after first hearing Travis Scott in 2015, Shushu was inspired by Lil Peep, and Shoddy had Lady Gaga on repeat when he began making beats at the age of 15.

Nu China artists have also been shaped by IRL dancefloor epiphanies. While studying in London, Billionhappy was a regular at the Eastern Margins parties across the city and early iterations of Genesys, a cutting-edge club night with a futuristic audiovisual element. Hainafromchina developed a taste for clubbing in Vancouver, where she moved for uni and founded her party collective Normie Corp, which runs events everywhere from Canada to Manila. For singer Shushu, whose reverb-smothered R&B nods to Kelela, her most formative moments came after hearing experimental dance music in Shanghai before the pandemic struck.

“I was going to the club literally every weekend,” she says. ​“Each weekend they would have a different, crazy line-up. I would see Yves Tumor, then Evian Christ, all these legends.”

Most of the Nu China artists cut their teeth performing in nightclubs like All Club and Abyss in Shanghai, and the now-defunct Loopy in Hangzhou. Left-field dance music producer Shoddy is the exception. Growing up in a small village in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou, a two- hour train journey to the nearest airport for flights to Shanghai, raving experiences still feel very fresh. Known for his eccentricity and brash humour, Shoddy also releases music under the aliases DJ Gurl (DJ 小女孩) – for which a female friend acts as his avatar online – and DJ Gonorrhea. His Linktree page has a button titled ​“The Fourth Mixtape by DJ Gonorrhea”, which leads directly to the Chinese government’s official website.

With stories about China in the Western media often focusing on the Communist Party’s authoritarian control and surveillance of the population, it’s easy to imagine that the creative expression of Chinese artists would be stifled. This perception is not completely unfounded – alongside the firewall, the country has some of the strictest censorship laws in the world. Freedoms, too, are curtailed, most notably and notoriously with the mass human rights abuses of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang – abuses that Beijing denies.

“Chinese people are scared of the government because of the way that we’re educated,” Shoddy says. ​“In some ways I’m scared, because I have to live, but in my music I’m not scared of anybody.”

Alongside Nu China, there’s a whole new generation emerging, their creativity and networks fuelled by VPNs, WeChat, Douyin and DIY dancefloors. Influences from the West are being alloyed with movements happening behind the firewall, creating something that’s both distinctly modern and distinctly Chinese.

“We didn’t really have youth culture in my mum’s generation, because we were communist,” says Billionhappy. ​“Everyone dressed the same. Then we were influenced by America. But now that we’ve had a long time to mix those cultures, I think we’re going to have something new.”