In a sprawling industrial city in Inner Mongolia, three rappers surround a microphone, dressed in the baseball caps, baggy trousers and branded trainers favored by hip-hop fans the world over.
The sparsely populated region in northeastern China counts mining and milk among its main industries, and locals are more familiar with throat-singing than rapping.
However, members of China’s Mongolian ethnic minority, whose ancestors were first united by Genghis Khan, are turning to hip-hop to condemn the resources boom they say is wreaking havoc on their traditions and lands — while avoiding the authorities’ attention.
Photo: AFP
“Herders are bribed with cash, and our land is torn up by machines,” the trio, who go by the English name Poorman, rap in their track Tears. “Brothers and sisters, we need to wake up!”
Once an economic backwater, the development of thousands of coal mines to tap Inner Mongolia’s vast mineral reserves has made the region one of China’s fastest-growing.
However, while some have prospered from the mining boom, other Mongolians resent being displaced from their land to make room for the mines, which they say scar the steppe and discriminate against them in recruiting.
“There are all these songs about the beauty of Inner Mongolia’s grasslands, but when people come to visit they realize it’s being turned into desert,” said band member Sodmuren, 25, who, like many Mongolians, uses a single name.
The region’s rappers adopted the genre a decade ago from their ethnic fellows in neighboring Mongolia, an independent country which has had a thriving hip-hop scene for more 20 years.
“Hip-hop is the most honest kind of music there is,” Sodmuren said in a recording studio in Inner Mongolia’s capital, Hohhot, where swathes of newly built concrete apartment blocks stretch into the grassy countryside.
China’s Mongolians have seen their traditional way of life transformed by government policies encouraging nomadic herders to abandon their grazing lands for flats in the cities.
As a result, most of the region’s rappers grew up in an urban environment. However, Sodmuren and his bandmates retain a fascination with nomadic culture, incorporating pastoral imagery into their music.
One of Poorman’s videos shows the band sitting outside traditional tents, known as yurts, with one member wearing the deel, a Mongolian gown.
“Although we grew up in yurts, after years in the city we’re forgetting our culture,” they sing.
A few minutes’ drive away from their studio, a sprawling Gucci store is testament to the new class of millionaires created by the mining boom, and their splurging on luxury cars and clothing.
However, Eregjin, a baseball-capped 27-year-old solo rapper who has been singing under the name MC Bondoo since he was a teenager, said: “We don’t admire luxury culture. We hate materialism, and the worship of expensive things.”
He has the national symbol of independent Mongolia tattooed on his right arm.
Mongolians are one of dozens of minority groups who live along China’s borders and speak Mandarin as a second language, seeing themselves as culturally different from the majority Han Chinese — now 79 percent of Inner Mongolia’s population.
Mandarin is increasingly popular for economic reasons even among Mongolians, and the rappers see their songs as a way to keep their own tongue alive.
“We’re worried about the future of the Mongolian language, because there are fewer and fewer children attending bilingual schools,” Sodmuren said. “The danger is that we’ll lose our Mongolian identity.”
Ethnic identification can be a sensitive topic in China, where the government is anxious to avoid social unrest.
When a Han Chinese coal truck driver ran over a Mongolian herdsman last year it triggered more than a week of protests by hundreds of people in cities and towns across the region.
A rapper known as Syrlig was detained by authorities last year after writing a song called Stand up, Inner Mongolians, several singers said. He has since moved to Mongolia, the rappers said.
“There are some lyrics we’d sing in shows, but if we published them we’d be arrested,” MC Bater, a member of one of Inner Mongolia’s most successful hip hop groups, PTS, said.
However, the scene’s low profile, combined with a degree of self-censorship — declining to target individuals or the ruling Communist Party by name — allows Mongolian rappers to escape censure from the authorities.
“I complain about government officials in my songs, but I don’t name anyone directly,” Sodmuren said. “I have to be smart.”
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS