The Rap of China (中国有嘻哈)

The Rap of China (中国有嘻哈) is a Chinese hip-hop music talent competition web series produced by the streaming platform iQiyi, first broadcast exclusively on iQiyi from June 24, 2017. It was the first hip-hop music talent show in China, and it moved rap from a small underground scene into mainstream Chinese popular culture, making household names of previously underground rappers such as GAI and PG One.^{1 • 2}

Production and format

The show was developed as an S+ priority iQiyi original for 2017 and was the largest investment the platform had made in any web variety program to that point.^{5 • 3} Its chief producer, Chen Wei, had previously been deputy director of Zhejiang TV's program center, where he worked on hits such as The Voice of China; the director, Che Che, had directed The Masked Singer.^{3 • 1} The production team numbered over a thousand people and included four directors each capable of independently running a major seasonal production.³

Dramatic editing. The season was cut like an American drama series, with one story arc across 12 episodes and a cliffhanger at the end of each installment, a choice Chen Wei explained as a way to hold viewers for a genre that was then too niche to attract them on music alone.³ The season used 17 art scenes and as many as 96 camera operators with 107 cameras, collecting more than 600 TB of raw footage; a separate account puts the material ratio at 2500:1, meaning 2,500 hours of footage for every hour broadcast.^{3 • 6} Unlike conventional singing competitions, most of the running time tested contestants through freestyle creation and team collaboration, and songs were largely original rather than covers.⁷

The format drew on the Korean rap competition Show Me The Money, and the show deliberately targeted viewers born in the 1990s and after, pairing underground contestants with high-traffic celebrity producers.^{8 • 9}

Commercial risk and payoff

At the launch event on May 2, 2017, the show was widely mocked in the production industry, the music world, and the hip-hop scene itself, with skeptics doubting that China had a hip-hop audience at all and questioning iQiyi's ability to stage a large-scale talent show.^{3 • 1} Advertisers shared the doubt: brands that wanted young consumers hesitated to sponsor a genre they saw as too niche, and committed sponsors withdrew before recording began, leaving the season to start from what Chen Wei called "zero sponsorship".^{3 • 10}

iQiyi nonetheless raised its investment repeatedly, from an initial tens of millions of yuan to 100 million, then 120 million, and finally more than 250 million yuan, a figure above the cost of a first-tier satellite TV reality show.³ Chen Wei argued the outlay bought full ownership of the intellectual property, with sponsorship, operations, and content all handled in-house rather than split with a rights holder.³ Even so, he acknowledged that on advertising revenue alone the first season lost money, with the full industry chain roughly breaking even; advertising remained the largest income component, and the title sponsorship alone was worth 120 million yuan.³ By mid-September 2017, before season 2 had a named sponsor, iQiyi's chief content officer Wang Xiaohui said its sponsorship total would rank first among web variety shows and roughly match a major TV variety show.¹⁰

Audience reach and social media

The show's spread ran through social media as much as through the streaming platform itself. On Weibo, short videos from the show drew 8 billion views, exceeding the views on iQiyi's own platform; the peak heat index for hip-hop rose 556-fold after the show began; the top 70 contestants gained a combined 20.85 million followers; the main topic exceeded 7 billion reads with 26.71 million discussions; the show appeared on the hot-search list 461 times; and the word "freestyle" was mentioned over 100 million times on Weibo.^{4 • 3}

Cross-platform operation. iQiyi and Weibo ran the first cross-platform dual-platform voting system, in which a viewer watching a three-minute clip on Weibo could be routed into the iQiyi app for the full episode.³ In late August and early September 2017, iQiyi released three different pieces of content within four days, including a live stream of the finalists' solo showcases across three live platforms, which Chen Wei described as the first nonlinear operation of its kind in media distribution.³ The judges' star power drove much of the early audience: Kris Wu, then at the height of his fame, asked a contestant "Do you have freestyle?" in the first episode, and the phrase became an internet meme.² On Douban, season 1 scored 7.3 from 49,252 raters.¹¹

Cultural impact

The first season's 12 episodes drew 2.5 billion views online and introduced rap and hip-hop culture to households across China, turning rappers who had performed in small bars for little money into household names.² Chinese commentary dates the mainstreaming of the genre to this moment: 2017 came to be called "China hip-hop year one" (中国嘻哈元年), and hip-hop dress, rap vocabulary such as freestyle and double rhymes, and hip-hop gestures spread rapidly across the internet.⁸

The show also changed how the genre was framed. It was positioned as "youth, sunshine, positive energy", localizing hip-hop for Chinese audiences and dissolving the rebellious elements of Western hip-hop, while contestants presented the "keep it real" ethos as sincerity about dreams and everyday life.¹² Scholars have described the show's de-politicization of hip-hop, achieved by emphasizing technical skill over expression, and research reviews note that Chinese rap has completed its shift from marginal culture to mass cultural product under platform mechanisms.^{7 • 13} The show pushed rap, previously in a "non-mainstream" position within the Chinese pop music system, to mainstream audiences, and created the "reality show plus talent competition" narrative model that later Chinese rap competitions followed.^{14 • 15}

Censorship and the 2018 rebrand

The season's two winners, GAI and PG One, saw their fortunes diverge almost immediately. Rumors about PG One's personal life spread online, and the Communist Youth League criticized one of his older songs for lyrics that appeared to reference cocaine use, crossing a regulatory red line.² In 2018, the censors who oversee Chinese media issued a directive telling the entertainment industry not to feature artists with tattoos or those who represented hip-hop or other subcultures. GAI missed a scheduled appearance on a popular singing competition despite a successful first showing, no rappers appeared on Chinese variety television for months, PG One's new music was taken down by platforms, and iQiyi removed the entire first season for a period.²

By late summer 2018 the show returned for a second season under a changed Chinese name, from "China Has Hip-Hop" to "China Has 'Shuochang'" (中国新说唱), shuochang being a term that also refers to traditional forms of Chinese storytelling; the English name stayed the same.² Regulators allowed hip-hop to continue on the condition that lyrics avoid mentions of drugs and sex, an arrangement one researcher summarized as regulators succeeding in co-opting hip-hop artists: popularity on television required respecting the red line.² The second season promoted itself with the slogan "speak out positive energy, sing out great sentiment", and its content emphasized "Chinese style" and national symbols.¹⁶ GAI, the season 1 co-winner, later performed songs about China's history on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala.²

Legacy

The show is credited with building China's rap industry: a single cultural product that originated a genre's mainstream market, in the words of an Associated Press retrospective, and the starting point from which Chinese rap completed its shift from marginal subculture to mass cultural product.^{2 • 13} It spawned a wave of rap competition programming, including iQiyi's own The Rap of China sequels, Bilibili's Rap for Youth (说唱新世代, 2020), and Mango TV's Listen Up (说唱听我的, 2020), continuing the localization of hip-hop music culture in China.⁸ A ten-year retrospective of Chinese rap notes that before 2017, crews such as YinTsang, Longmenzhen, In3, C-BLOCK, Say Say Way, Red Flower Club, GOSH, and SUP, and battle events such as Iron Mic and Underground 8 Miles, had already accumulated the musicians, regional styles, and live culture on which the show drew.¹⁷ Later rap variety shows have not matched the social buzz of the 2017 peak.¹⁷

References

1. 爱奇艺《中国有嘻哈》宣传案例, IAI传鉴国际广告奖
2. A Chinese flavor of rap music is flourishing as emerging musicians find their voices, Associated Press (2024)
3. 对话《中国有嘻哈》总制片人：网络综艺如何成为现象级IP, 澎湃新闻 (2017)
4. 【案例】一波三折的中国说唱帝国养成记
5. 中国有嘻哈, 搜狗百科
6. 复盘《中国有嘻哈》霸屏，头部内容小聚焦换来流量口碑大爆破？, 界面新闻 (2017)
7. 王嘉军：《中国有嘻哈》与嘻哈的文化政治, 文艺研究 (2018)
8. 浅析国内说唱类综艺的本土化演进, 参考网 (2021)
9. 从《中国有嘻哈》看中国说唱文化发展, 现代商贸工业 (2019)
10. 专访爱奇艺王晓晖：从奇葩说到有嘻哈 爆款的商业秘密 (2017)
11. 综艺豆瓣评分表, 申万宏源研究
12. 文艺与中国式现代化研究
13. 国内关于说唱音乐的研究综述 (2025)
14. 以《中国有嘻哈》为例管窥网络综艺中的符号标出, 人民网 (2017)
15. 贾雨歌、王建华：说唱之间：网络说唱选秀节目的叙事分析, 中华文化论坛 (2021)
16. 专题：社会中的音乐，现实里的声响, 文化研究 (2019)
17. A Ten-Year Research Report on Chinese Rap 2017–2026, GitHub

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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