Write a Haiku, Win some Scotch at Saturday’s Radii Launch Party

You may have already heard, but we’re holding a launch party this Saturday at Great Leap No. 6 (original courtyard location), and everyone is invited.

In addition to giving away free beers — to those who have followed our Facebook page before the event — we’ll also give away pours of scotch whisky for those who write the most crowd-pleasing haikus.

Just tweet them @RadiiChina before noon Saturday.

(The haiku in the flyer above is by Jeremiah Jenne, who you’ll see around these parts not too long after our official launch.)

Here’s the original party poster for those who haven’t seen it:

Questions/comments? We’re at [email protected].

Hey Beijing, We’re Holding a Launch Party. You Should Come

Wondering who we are and what we’re doing? Swing by our official launch party this Saturday, June 10, to mingle with our team and hang out with contributors. We’re real people!

We’ll be hanging out at Great Leap No. 6 at Doujiao Hutong （豆角胡同6号） starting at 3 pm. Here’s a Baidu map, and here it is on Google.

And yes, follow us on Facebook before the event to get a free GLB beer that day.

In the meantime, we’re going to continue fumigating and ironing up through the weekend. Follow us on Twitter and check out our YouTube page and Instagram. It’s all pretty bare for now, but we’ll be doing cool things. Stick around.

Questions/comments? You can reach us any time at [email protected].

UPDATE: Also… haiku for scotch:

The Forbidden City

On a good day in Beijing.

(Pictures via Lucia, published here with permission.)

Yin: Bastard, I Miss You

At the end of 2015, a strange pop hybrid was born in the form of a collaboration that came seemingly out of nowhere – A.G. Cook, head of the ultra-hip London label and collective PC Music, wrote and produced Chinese pop star Chris Lee’s double A-side single Real Love / Only You. It was the first time PC Music had collaborated with a pop star, let alone one from Asia. And although Chris Lee had a penchant for experimentation, working previously with the likes of Karl Lagerfeld and Shanghai’s Yuz Museum, PC Music was unlike anything she’d done before.

In recent years, PC Music has become a sensation in the underground electronic scene. With their saccharine plastic-wrapped pop melodies and beats from the corporate future, they’re something between pop music and parody. And Chris Lee? Best known for her androgyny, Lee rocketed to fame in 2005 as the unlikely tomboy winner of Super Girl, an immensely popular televised singing contest. She has since gone on to become a heavy-hitter in the Chinese music scene, releasing dozens of chart-topping singles and selling millions of album copies. She is a bona fide pop star. So what did it mean when these two crossed paths? Was PC Music evolving into actual pop, or was Chris Lee becoming subversive?

I’m not really sure. But we do get a moody electronic track to show for it, “Only You” — or 《混蛋，我想你》 (“Bastard, I miss you”) — a rarity in ballad-filled mainstream Chinese music. For Chris Lee fans, it’s the musical successor to her 2014 single “A Magical Encounter 1987.” And for PC Music fans, it’s the same squeaky-clean PC Music aesthetic, so clean you can hear a pin clatter on the floor. But it’s also been tamped down and stretched out into rippling synthesizer force fields, over which Lee’s voice repeats “I miss you” like a hypnotizing mantra.

Those behind the Great Firewall can watch the music video to Only You here.

Yin (音, “music”) is a weekly Radii feature that looks at Chinese songs spanning classical to folk to modern experimental, and everything in between. Drop us a line if you have a suggestion: [email protected].

Propaganda as Art: A Shanghai Museum’s Vintage Posters

If you’ve spent any time in China, you’re probably familiar with the efforts of China’s propaganda ministry, currently known as the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China. Their handiwork can be seen all over China’s cities and countryside, to say nothing of the Internet, such as this infamous animated music video introducing the Communist Party’s 13th Five Year Plan. (“The Shi San Wu!”)

More iconic than these modern methods of “opinion guidance,” however, are the stark, provocative propaganda posters dating from 1949 to 1978. Most of these posters feature strong, handsome young peasants and workers posing in front of the purported achievements of New China, or in some cases, scenes of “enemies of the people” getting their just desserts. Subtlety was not the guiding principle of the era, unlike idealism, which was widespread.

Probably the best place to see these in person is the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center, an enchanting museum run by retired hospitality industry veteran Yang Peiming. Originally just one room in the basement of an apartment building in 2002, the museum has expanded to three rooms occupying more than 400 square meters, with a collection encompassing more than 6,000 posters from the Republican era on down to today.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of posters like the ones on show at the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center is the way they allow you to trace the evolution of modern Chinese history, with its tumultuous twists and turns, from the initial optimism of the post-war period to the grimness of the Great Leap Forward and later the fanatical revolutionary impulses that dominated the Cultural Revolution. Posters in those years were actually one of the Party’s primary means of communication with the public, especially a semi-literate one, and the museum’s collection is a look at the sometimes rapidly shifting official viewpoints throughout the years on a wide variety of topics, from agriculture and industrial development to foreign relations and family values.

Politics aside, Yang’s museum also has dazibao, or “Big Character Posters,” and a series of “Worker Artists’” Woodblock Prints from the 1970s, as well as a large collection of what he terms “Shanghai Lady Posters,” reproductions of which you’ve probably seen in tourist markets and shops. These are excellent examples of early consumer advertising for the brands of the day, which typically feature a pretty young woman in a qipao, whose appearance and surroundings are meant to exemplify the modern, cosmopolitan lifestyles of bourgeois Chinese during the heady years between the fall of the Qing in 1911 and the advent of Communism in 1949.

Whether commercial or political, these posters are a fascinating look at the changes China underwent during the 20th century, and a tour of Yang’s collection can provide an entertaining, useful counterpoint to the attitudes and ideas about China’s history and identity we see reflected in the media, both here and abroad.

Replica Chinese propaganda posters can be purchased at www.chinesepropagandaposters.com.

Watch: Higher Brothers and Keith Ape’s Fire “WeChat” Music Video

In an unusual display of Chinese-South Korean pop culture harmony, Chengdu-based trap phenomenon Higher Brothers has linked up with Keith Ape of It G Ma fame for a new song, simply called WeChat.

WeChat is the ubiquitous Chinese messaging/social media app that defines the majority of the country’s mobile social power: you can call a taxi, order food, pay for coffee, browse feeds and connect with businesses all without leaving the app. In many ways, WeChat is the network that keeps the country running and prospering, so maybe it’s not so surprising that Higher Brothers decided to honor their favorite app with a smartphone-friendly vertical music video shot entirely inside the WeChat user interface. The video starts with an explanation:

There’s no Skype, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, we use WeChat!

They’ve been pretty direct with their feelings on censorship before (they told Pigeons and Planes last year they feel they have fewer resources due to the Chinese firewall, and that their reach to the outside world is limited), but the rest of the song is your standard everyday flexing — the hook translates to, “I don’t open WeChat to listen to your bullshit.”

It’s a lyrically dense, melodic new-school trap bump, the likes of which would make Lil Yachty proud.

Yachty also appears in the video, one of several major artists featured as WeChat messages — the likes of Migos, Famous Dex, G Herbo, Smokepurpp, Kyle, and Bohan Phoenix. A message from Bohan Phoenix reads vid dropping soon fam, and one from Kyle says he wants to set up a collab pronto. Foreshadowing?

For those behind the Great Firewall, watch the video here; best viewed on a phone.