In The Wall Dancers, the journalist Yi-Ling Liu takes as her subject the entirety of the Chinese internet: its evolution over the past decade and a half, its offer of freedom with one hand and surveillance with the other, its accommodation of both free-thinkers and hardened nationalists. (An excerpt from the new book ran in Equator last week.)

One of the strands of her reporting unfolds in Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan in southwestern China, where she went in 2018 to track the rise and fall of a distinctive regional hip-hop. In these photos, Yi-Ling gives us a whistle-stop tour of her immersion in Chengdu’s music scene.

Yi-Ling Liu

In 2018, I attended a gig by the Fuzhou-born rapper Vinida Weng. The crowd was raucous, chanting her lyrics back at her. I remember being struck by all of the phones, which people were waving like flashlights, and how the mobile internet was inextricably entwined with the experience of hip-hop music in China. (This photo ended up being the inspiration for my book cover art.)

While exploring Chengdu by day, I strolled through People's Park, where locals gather under traditional pavilions to drink tea, play mahjong and shoot the breeze. I remember being struck by how slow the pace of life was in this city, compared to the metropolises out East, like Beijing and Shanghai. No one was in a rush; no one had anywhere urgent to be.

At night, I walked along the Jin River, ducking in and out of riverside bars. The night was still young when I stumbled into one singer crooning a pop song to a still, quiet venue. I remember being mesmerised by the colours and lights on stage.

One evening, I went looking for an underground fight club. I followed a young man through the backdoor of a KTV parlor in a shuttered mall, down an elevator and through a maze of corridors to the basement. Fraying disco balls hung above a boxing ring; a Higher Brothers track blasted from the speakers. The crowd sported tattoos, topknots, and Converses studded with gold rhinestones.

I interviewed the six young men part of the Chengdu-based hip-hop crew HuStar, in an apartment in the Yilin district where they lived and made music together. They came from all across the country: TSP from the outskirts of Sichuan, Rainbow and Skinyoyo from the central grasslands of Xi'an and Shandong, Kongkong from the southern coast of Hong Kong, Fendi Boi and Young13DBaby from the northern mountains of Lhasa and Gansu.