Banned in China, on tour in Japan: a folk-rock icon makes an unexpected return

Li Zhi, whose music has been missing from Chinese streaming sites for five years, finds a surprising way to get back on the road

Hello and welcome to Concrete Avalanche, a newsletter about music from China. Thanks very much for reading.

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In this issue: one of Concrete Avalanche’s occasional specials, this time on a folk-rock figure with a cult following whose politically-charged lyrics saw his music wiped from Chinese streaming sites and his planned tour of Sichuan abruptly halted five years ago. Limited to surprise, sometimes disguised, unofficial appearances at home since, he’s finally doing a proper tour again this month — in an unexpected location.

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Just briefly…

With Record Store Day once again upon us this weekend, I wanted to quickly re-up a piece I wrote around this time last year looking at the popularity of vinyl and independent record shops in China.

I’ve not done too much digging for events in the country this year, but I know that Chengdu’s celebration — where I took the below cover photo a few years back — is due to take place this weekend. Can’t guarantee that that dancing ayi will be there again, but also wouldn’t bet against it.

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The Forbidden Game: cult favourite folk-rock singer Li Zhi, banned in China, tours Japan

A Chinese folk-rock artist is playing a series of shows in Japan this month. No big deal, you might be thinking. After all, over the last few months this newsletter has mentioned quite a few Chinese acts touring overseas. But this one is different — and unexpected.

The artist in question is Li Zhi, who hasn’t toured properly in China for the last five years. It’s not been for a lack of trying.

Back in early 2019, Li was gearing up for a special tour that would see him perform 23 shows across Sichuan province. It was part of an ambitious plan to play 334 “lower-tier” cities around the country. Yet just as it was about to begin, the Sichuan tour was abruptly cancelled.

At the time, Li’s official Weibo account simply posted an image of a hospital wristband with the caption “sorry”, sparking concerns for the singer’s health. Two months later, a different explanation emerged. Sichuan’s culture department boasted that they had “urgently halted” a tour by an unnamed “singer with improper conduct” earlier that year. The number of shows by this shady character that they’d managed to stop? 23.

Days later, Li Zhi’s songs disappeared from Chinese streaming services and his social media accounts were no longer viewable.

Li had long been an outspoken figure. In 2018, he’d sued a popular variety show in China for using his music without permission. He won the case, albeit receiving significantly less compensation than the 3 million RMB he’d asked for. One theory for the cancellation of his Sichuan tour and the removal of his presence from the Chinese internet was that the TV producers had taken their revenge.

Another theory was related to a sensitive anniversary. Two of Li’s early songs, ‘Goddess’ and ‘The Square’, are widely interpreted as being about the Tiananmen Square protests. With 2019 marking 30 years since those events, some suggested his planned tour of smaller cities had been deemed too risky.

Either way, he hasn’t been able to properly tour in China since.

Li was born in Jiangsu province, in a small town that was swallowed up by a larger city. With this pattern repeating itself across China, Li’s songs of small town / suburban life and of trying to adapt in a big city — in his case, the provincial capital of Nanjing — struck a chord. So too did Li’s down-to-earth character; even as his songs gained traction, he eschewed the trappings of mainstream celebrity. He only signed to a major label in 2018, some 14 years after the release of his debut album The Forbidden Game. He not only avoided mainstream TV shows, but — as mentioned above — he sued one of them.

Li typically appeared on stage wearing a plain T-shirt and jeans and a haircut that looked like it’d been done at the small, perennially cheap barbershop he sings of in the track ‘Rehe Road’. He often looked to all intents and purposes like just another person you’d see on the streets.

His tour of “lower-tier” cities therefore didn’t feel like a gimmick, as it so easily could have done in the hands of a different artist — it felt like a genuine attempt to bring music to places that most people didn’t even know existed.

Since the abrupt cancellations of early 2019, there have been glimmers of hope for his fans, but also plenty of reminders that few figures are able to publicly bounce back from such treatment.

In May 2020, Librairie Avant-Garde, a bookshop chain founded in Nanjing and with a bit of an independent streak, announced a blind box package in collaboration with Li and named after his album I Love Nanjing. They appeared to think things had cooled off. They were wrong. The WeChat post announcing the package was swiftly deleted. But highlighting the seriousness of the apparent infringement, the bookshop’s official account on the platform was also slapped with a permanent ban. (It was able to later resurrect it under a different handle.)

Undeterred, a few months later, East Sea Music Festival — an indie-leaning event that takes place in a lovely spot on a beach on China’s eastern coast — announced “Nanjing XX” as a headliner and made repeated, coded references to Li in the promotions for its tenth anniversary special. But as the date for the festival approached, storm clouds gathered — literally. Before anyone could find out whether the organisers would get away with prominently hosting such a controversial act, East Sea Music Festival was forced to reschedule due to an incoming typhoon. When it announced new dates, the mysterious headliner had been removed.

In October that year, I attended a show in Shanghai. There was a ripple of excitement at one point in the audience as it became clear that Li Zhi was in attendance. It was a great gig, but afterwards the buzz was largely about Li being present; people had surrounded him at the end, swarming to pat him on the back and shake his hand.

Since then, I’ve seen similar ripples in music circles, this time digitally, emanating from snippets of information about Li. He’s even returned to the stage on occasion, often unofficially, with some shows more signposted than others.

Four gigs in the summer of 2020 featuring three of Li’s regular backing band, for example, caused plenty of excitement. The shows were billed as being part of a “Three Missing One” tour and fans noted that the first concert was scheduled for Chengdu’s Aflame Livehouse, the venue where Li’s cancelled Sichuan tour was meant to begin in 2019. Li reportedly took to the stage, 484 days after his “disappearance”.

Any hopes that those shows might lead to Li undertaking a more extensive tour of China, or that they were a sign he might be allowed a low level comeback, have been eroded with time however. There has still been the odd ripple — such as rumours of a figure performing Li Zhi songs while wearing a hoodie and with their back to the audience at a gig in early 2023 — but a proper China tour doesn’t seem likely any time soon.

Even just getting ahold of his back catalogue digitally has become difficult, with some international streaming sites offering curtailed versions of his albums. Look up his classic 2006 album 这​个​世​界​会​好​吗 (often translated as Has Man a Future), for example, and you’ll likely find it missing the title track. Full versions can still be found for sale on Chinese e-commerce sites and even internationally if you know where to look and how to search, but it’s clear that in some cases certain tracks have been pulled even beyond China’s borders.

And then suddenly, a few weeks ago, there was this:

panda_record_jp

A post shared by @panda_record_jp

A five-date Japan run for the “Three Missing One” tour. The three main names around the mahjong table are long-time Li Zhi collaborators, while one tile features a familiar face, albeit one that’s not been seen on stage for some time.

The groundwork for this had seemingly been laid by Panda Record — a label dedicated to releasing Chinese music and touring Chinese artists in Japan — putting out a series of Li Zhi best ofs, starting (funnily enough) in April 2019.

Nevertheless, a full tour was an unexpected development, to me at least.

Understandably, they’re being quite careful with the tour. No video recording will be allowed at the shows, with attendees required to place their mobile phones in a special locked container before the performance starts.

Such restrictions don’t seem to have discouraged concertgoers however, with tickets for the first three shows sold out and standing tickets for the closing Tokyo date also all gone. When the tickets went on sale, it appears the Panda Record website may have struggled with the amount of traffic it received.

While it’s hard to know where the audience for these gigs is coming from exactly, it’s notable that the payment methods section for the tour puts WeChat and Alipay — China’s two biggest digital payment platforms by some distance — at the forefront and adds a line emphasising that “tickets can be bought from inside China, no need to have a Japanese bank account”.

While Li’s music is still officially unavailable on Chinese streaming sites, that hasn’t stopped discussion of his Japan tour on social media in the country. One post on the subject on Weibo jokes: “Li Zhi is probably China’s most global indie musician. After all, you can only see a live show of his if you go abroad.”

Ding Taisheng, a music critic known for his sharp-tongued takedowns of a number of high profile pop singers on mainstream TV shows, dedicated one of his recent videos to a discussion of Li Zhi and the forthcoming tour of Japan (watch below). Ding has had his own struggles on Chinese social media, with his official accounts shuttered last summer, and this video unsurprisingly doesn’t appear to have been published officially on any video sites in the country.

After an outlining of Li’s career and music, as well as a brief mention of the abandoned Sichuan tour (“we can’t know the reasoning” behind the sudden cancellations, he says), Ding makes his position on Li’s live return abundantly clear. “When I heard Li Zhi was going to tour Japan, I was so happy for him,” he says in the video, screenshots of which have made it to Chinese social platforms. “And I’m sure that the tickets for this tour will be just like the tickets for those shows back in China — they’ll sell out quickly. And I’m sure that at the concerts, everyone will be singing along.”

As with many of Li’s music videos on YouTube, several of which have topped 1 million views each, the comments section on Ding’s video is flooded with people posting in Chinese with memories of Li Zhi songs and concerts, and statements of solidarity with the singer. There are also calls for him to come and play in other places, including North America.

Rapper PG One, another artist who has seen their back catalogue scrubbed from Chinese streaming sites (albeit for quite different reasons), has shown that it’s possible to tour regularly overseas and find an audience. It seems doubtful that Li Zhi would follow suit in quite the same way, but who knows? For now, here’s hoping his shows in Japan go off without a hitch.

And, of course, here’s hoping that this world gets better.