CHANGCHUN, China (news agencies) — Crouch through the small metal door and walk down the dark tunnel, and even before you step into the abandoned air raid shelter, the air reverberates with pounding techno beats. Young Chinese holding booze and cigarettes shake and sway in a red-lit passageway, below a big screen rolling through quotations from Chairman Mao.
This is an underground rave in China, part of a subculture growing in hidden corners of the nation’s cities, even as its political and cultural mainstream grow increasingly controlled, staid and predictable.
For Chinese ravers, these gatherings — often called “ye di,” or “wild dances” — not only offer a rare space for unfettered fun, but signal resistance to the narrowly prescribed future a rigid society expects for them.
By day, Xing Long works in the office of a state-owned company in Changchun, an industrial city in China’s northeastern rust belt region.
By night, he’s a DJ and underground rave organizer, a side gig that offers an escape from the humdrum of reviewing corporate contracts.
“My job cannot make me feel I fulfilled my values,” he said. “Going to work is like executing a prewritten program.”
Chinese young people face intense pressure and high expectations from the society around them. In recent years, facing bleak economic prospects, Chinese youth culture has been swept by a series of viral slang terms to describe frustration and hopelessness: “ 996 ” — the brutal 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week work schedule many companies ask of employees. “Involution” — an endless treadmill of pointless competition that fresh graduates face. “ Lying flat ” — the growing trend among young people of giving up all ambition and aiming to do as little as possible.
Techno dance parties are an escape from all that for people like Xing. Every time he walks into a rave, the 31-year-old said, his brain “jolts awake like a bang.”
Xing first learned about techno music from a documentary made by the American media company Vice.
“My eyes brightened up when I heard it,” he said. “I should’ve listened to this kind of music earlier.”
Xing began going to raves in Shenzhen, a southern city with a population of 17 million, but when he moved home in 2021 he realized no one else was organizing them.
“I want this city to have an underground techno music scene,” he said. “I want to listen to it myself, so I want to make it happen.”
Xing said that the underground techno scene fascinated him because it’s “real” even if not perfect, bad, not in the right order, or broken.
“It’s not a beautiful thing that was deliberately produced into a mold to present to the mainstream.”
In recent years, space for culture and creativity has been shrinking in China as the authorities have ramped up censorship of concerts, shows, and other cultural events. Comedians have been silenced after joking about topics considered politically sensitive. A growing number of independent bookstores and creative spaces have shut down under pressure, while state-sanctioned media promotes uplifting, often saccharine narratives.
Yet underground raves are free from all those limitations because they sprout in gray zones. Hidden from public view, they skirt formal approval processes, neither supported nor suppressed by the state.
Feng Zhe, 27, a rave organizer in Shenyang, a northeastern city about 400 miles from Beijing, said raves are about “refusing to be disciplined by society.”
“This is probably not how the world functions nowadays,” he said, adding that societies want to make people follow their rules and be useful but “underground culture is useless.”
“Most people are going to be repressed,” Feng said.
But for most rave organizers, the real meaning of underground rave culture is simply having fun. Loong Wu, a 26-year-old art student, started organizing raves in 2021 during COVID-19 lockdowns out of boredom.
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