New Edition: How Hip Hop Became China’s Favorite Music Genre

From a handful of underground groups to an overnight sensation, here's how the genre has evolved in China

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7:45 PM HKT, Tue March 16, 2021

Since the early 1970s, when it was born out of Black communities in New York City, hip hop has become one of the United States’s biggest musical exports. It wasn’t until the early ’90s, however, that China’s first rap song came to be, and for decades hip hop was only performed and listened to by a handful of small, underground communities around the country.

Today, however, rap is huge in China thanks to the success of reality television, and is used by advertisers to sell everything from Sprite and sportswear.

Our latest Edition, “Hip Hop in China,” explores the rocky road that the music genre has had to mainstream success, and the hip hop artists that have helped impact the genre the most — only on RADII.co.

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RADII.co is a new mobile experience from RADII — a faster, more intuitive way to keep up with the fastest moving country in the world.

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Header image: Thana Gu

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