What Is Real? What Is Fake? Transitional Chinese Hip-Hop Culture and the War of Authenticity

Abstract

There is nothing more important in hip-hop than "keeping it real," and yet real-ness – or authenticity – itself is a constantly contested concept. Drawing upon half a year of extensive fieldwork throughout China as well as online content analysis from 2017-2019, this thesis pulls from global hip-hop studies, media theory, Chinese and Western philosophy, and cultural studies to investigate the functional role of authenticity in contemporary Chinese hip-hop. It builds upon an extremely scarce body of literature on this recent youth culture phenomenon, presenting the first Western ethnography of the Chinese subculture in the current new media era.

In doing so, this thesis constructs a novel conceptual framework to clarify the complex power dynamic between the key players of state, industry, artist, and fan positioned within the subculture’s rapid post-2017 mainstream transition. Situating the principle of authenticity at the center of these relations, the thesis identifies how Chinese hip-hop simultaneously cooperates with and opposes/subverts the forces of state and industry. It also formulates a multi-stage process whereby individuals in Chinese hip-hop culture wrestle with their own subjective conceptions of authenticity, arguing that the concept of real-ness leads participants to embark on an existential project of self-understanding that transcends hip-hop altogether.