Beijing underground, Shanghai noise: the Chinese music the rest of the world is just starting to find

The standard Western story about music in China runs roughly like this: a billion people, heavy censorship, state-approved pop, nothing worth importing. It is a story that is wrong in almost every particular. China has had a functioning punk underground since the mid-1990s. It has had an indie rock ecosystem dense enough to support its own labels and venues since the early 2000s. Its experimental electronic scene has been placing artists at Berghain, Tate Modern, the Elbphilharmonie, and the Unsound festival for nearly a decade. One of its producers was personally selected by Aphex Twin to play the Warehouse Project in Manchester. Almost none of this has reached general Western awareness, because the music industry's global distribution infrastructure runs through English-language markets, and these artists operate mostly outside it — on Bandcamp, on NTS Radio, in club residencies across Europe and East Asia, and in a domestic scene that does not especially need external validation.

This is a document of what has been building.

→ Beijing Underground, Shanghai Noise — the reference playlist on Spotify (8 tracks, generated by Playgen)

The room where it started: D-22, 2006–2012

The story of contemporary Chinese indie music has a specific origin point. In 2006, Michael Pettis — an American economist who had moved to Beijing in 2002 to teach at Peking University — opened a rock club in the city's northwest student quarter of Wudaokou. He called it D-22. Entry was cheap. The beer was cheap. The booking policy was: if you are a Beijing band and you want to play, you play.

D-22 ran until 2012, when a landlord dispute forced its closure. In six years it functioned as the incubator for a generation of Chinese bands that had no equivalent venue, no label support, and no obvious model for what they were doing. The weekly Zoomin' Night performance series, which began in August 2009, gave residencies to experimental and improvised-music projects that would have had nowhere else to play in the city. From D-22's stage came Carsick Cars, Snapline, Hedgehog, The Gar, P.K.14, and the psychedelic quartet Chui Wan — a catalogue of bands who collectively invented what Chinese post-punk and indie rock sound like.

In 2007, Pettis hired Yang Haisong — vocalist of D-22 regulars P.K.14 — to run a record label out of the same building. They called it Maybe Mars (兵馬司). It became the most consequential Chinese indie label of the 2000s and 2010s, releasing records by almost every band in the D-22 orbit and distributing them internationally through Bandcamp and licensing deals. D-22 closed; Maybe Mars did not. It is still operating.

Carsick Cars: the feedback, the cigarettes, the government compound

Carsick Cars formed in Beijing in 2005. Their sound — guitars that drone and distort in the manner of Velvet Underground, Suicide, and Sonic Youth, over rhythms that emphasize texture above structure — was immediately legible to anyone who had spent time with the American no-wave tradition, and immediately strange to anyone approaching it through Chinese pop.

Their most famous track, Zhong Nan Hai, is named after a brand of Chinese cigarettes, which is itself named after the government compound adjacent to the Forbidden City that houses the offices of the Communist Party's senior leadership. It is a seven-minute loop of droning guitar and near-monotone vocal that sounds nothing like what it is named after, and the naming itself — citing both a cigarette and the seat of the Chinese government in the same gesture — captures something about how Beijing indie rock operates: things are named for their context, not in opposition to it, and the music does its actual work somewhere else entirely.

In 2007, Sonic Youth toured China. The band had specifically requested two local openers for their Beijing and Shanghai shows: Carsick Cars was one of them. Chinese authorities intervened before the shows and banned both bands from performing. Carsick Cars flew to Europe instead and joined Sonic Youth for dates in Prague and Vienna. The episode — a band blocked from playing in their own city, then joining the same tour abroad — is a precise summary of how the international underground works relative to its domestic context.

Chui Wan: Zhuangzi, La Monte Young, and Sufi music played by four people from Beijing

Chui Wan (吹万) is a four-piece from Beijing who take their name from the Qi Wu Lun section of the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi — a text on the equivalence of all things. Their musical references span La Monte Young's drone minimalism, Sufi ritual music, Southeast Asian folk, and 20th-century avant-garde composition. They formed directly from the D-22 orbit: vocalist Yan Yulong and guitarist Liu Xinyu met at the venue and were shaped by the Zoomin' Night series.

Their self-titled first album (2013) sounds like nothing in Chinese rock and almost nothing in international rock — long pieces that hover in an open modal space, vocals that function as one instrument among several rather than as the carrier of the song. Their second album White Night (2016) pushes further into psychedelic territory without abandoning the austerity. They have toured Europe and North America, played First Avenue in Minneapolis and the Barbican in London, and remain, in 2026, one of the most genuinely distinctive bands to emerge from the Beijing scene. They are not easy listening. They are not meant to be.

Second Hand Rose: the most theatrical thing in Chinese music

Second Hand Rose (二手玫瑰) are a different thing entirely from the guitar-band lineage. Founded in Harbin in 1999 and relocated to Beijing, they are a rock band that processes traditional northeastern Chinese folk music — errenzhuan, the bawdy theatrical song form from Manchuria — through distorted guitars, heavy drums, and a lead singer, Liang Long, who performs in full drag with theatrical makeup and elaborate costume. Their lyrics are pointed social satire delivered in the vernacular of a form of popular entertainment that the CCP officially promotes while their actual content subjects Chinese society to close and uncomfortable examination.

The act of putting errenzhuan through a rock band is itself the statement: taking a form the state considers safely traditional and feeding it through an amplifier. Their live shows are theatrical events as much as concerts. Their music is dense with reference that requires cultural knowledge to fully decode — and is viscerally strange even without it. They have been making records since 2003 and playing festivals across China and Asia for two decades, and they represent a strain of Chinese underground that uses traditional form rather than rejecting it.

Shanghai electronic: SVBKVLT, 33EMYBW, Gooooose

While Beijing was building its indie rock ecosystem around D-22, Shanghai developed something different. The electronic underground there cohered around a venue called The Shelter — a converted air raid bunker beneath a mall in the French Concession — and around the label SVBKVLT, which grew out of the same community.

SVBKVLT (pronounced "subkult") was founded by Gaz Williams, a British expat who had been booking The Shelter and running NTS Radio shows from Shanghai. The label's aesthetic is deliberately ungraphable: it releases music that absorbs club music structure while refusing genre categorisation, frequently incorporating traditional Chinese sounds — guzheng, pipa, Beijing opera vocal fragments — into contexts that process them through modular synthesis, industrial noise, and rhythmic structures that owe more to footwork and grime than to anything in the Chinese mainstream.

33EMYBW (Wu Shanmin) is the label's most internationally prominent artist. Shanghai-born, formerly a bass player in a math-rock band, she moved into electronic music and built a practice that the European avant-garde festival circuit recognised before most of the music press did. She has performed at Berghain in Berlin, at Unsound in Kraków, at the Nyege Nyege Festival in Uganda. Her 2023 album Holes of Sinian — built around the Ediacaran biota, organisms that lived 635 to 541 million years ago — is one of the more unusual conceptual frames in recent experimental music. In 2024, Aphex Twin personally selected her to perform at the Warehouse Project in Manchester, which is as unambiguous an endorsement as the experimental electronic world offers.

Gooooose (Han Han) has been in the Shanghai scene for over fifteen years, initially through the band Duck Fight Goose, then as a solo producer. His 2023 album Rudiments returned to percussive and rhythmic fundamentals after years of more abstract work. Eggs — from that record — is club music in the sense that it has tempo and drive, but it moves sideways as much as it moves forward. Since post-pandemic travel resumed in late 2022, Gooooose has toured the UK and Europe multiple times. He plays to rooms that understand exactly what he is doing.

Howie Lee and the Do Hits collective

Howie Lee is a Beijing producer who in 2011 co-founded Do Hits — a party-turned-label that has been one of the defining forces in Chinese electronic music for fifteen years. His sound is the most explicit attempt in the scene to synthesise traditional Chinese musical culture with contemporary electronic production: Four Seas layers guqin — the ancient silk-string zither that has been played for three thousand years — over a production register borrowed from UK bass music. Taihe Blues processes what sounds like Chinese ceremonial music through a framework that resembles, at different moments, grime, dub, and early industrial. His 2024 release brought Buddhist chant and footwork rhythm together in a way that should be incongruous and is instead internally consistent.

What Howie Lee is doing is not fusion in the sense that the word is usually deployed — a compromise between two styles in which both are diluted. It is an argument that the guqin and the 808 are addressing the same problems from different directions, and that running them together reveals something neither could show alone. Whether that argument is persuasive depends entirely on whether you listen to it, and it takes a few listens before the argument becomes audible.

Pan Daijing: fully international

Pan Daijing was born in Guiyang, in Guizhou province in southwest China. She first heard techno on a trip to Europe at twenty and taught herself electronic music without institutional support. She moved to Berlin. She has performed at Berghain, the Barbican Centre, London's Tate Modern, Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. In 2024, she shared the Preis der Nationalgalerie — Germany's most prestigious contemporary art prize — with three other artists, producing a new work shown at Hamburg's Hamburger Bahnhof. In 2025, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis gave her a solo exhibition.

Her music is not club music in any commercial sense. Act Of The Empress is a piece for voice, processing, and the kind of silence that is louder than sound. Tissues — from her 2019 five-part performance-exhibition released on vinyl — is both a sound work and a scored performance. The category she occupies is contemporary art with a sound practice, which is both a more expansive category than "musician" and a less commercially tractable one.

Pan Daijing is the clearest example in Chinese experimental music of an artist who operates entirely outside the domestic constraints — based in Berlin, distributed on Western labels, received within the European art-music world — while remaining explicitly and deliberately Chinese in her stated identity and reference. She is not trying to cross over. She crossed over, and continued making music that is hard.

How the underground actually survives

The question that the Western frame always circles back to is: how does any of this exist given the censorship? It is the wrong question, or at least an imprecise one. The "positive energy" mandate that governs Chinese broadcast media and mainstream streaming does not apply uniformly to every context. A bar in Wudaokou playing an experimental noise set at midnight in 2009 is not the same as a nationally broadcast television programme. A Shanghai club night running to two hundred people is not the same as a viral Douyin video. The underground survives in the spaces the state is not watching closely, because those spaces are small enough not to warrant attention.

The constraint is real and it shapes everything at the margins. Bands self-censor around specific political content. Artists who want to remain in China calculate what can and cannot be said in what context. But the Western assumption — that censorship means there is no underground, no genuine creative autonomy, nothing worth engaging with — mistakes the nature of both censorship and creativity. The underground has always operated in the gaps. That is what makes it the underground.

The Chinese artists who have most fully broken into international consciousness — Pan Daijing, 33EMYBW, Howie Lee, Gooooose — are not making music that navigates censorship. They are making music that the state's content machinery largely does not know how to process, in contexts the mainstream apparatus is not watching. That freedom is partial and contingent. It is also real, and it has produced twenty years of work that deserves an audience beyond the rooms where it was first heard.