China Meiguo

Last week, Lingnan University hosted a Mass Dance competition with all 8 Hong Kong universities sending dance teams. Since I'm living on campus, I couldn't avoid the event since it drew a large crowd. Now, don't be mistaken - I'm not talking about any type of traditional Chinese dance - this was Hong Kong hip-hop dance style. It was admittedly quite entertaining and obviously the dance teams put a lot of effort into their performances since they were all very well-rehearsed. While I have no problem with Chinese students dancing to hip-hop or any other music they want to, I found it slightly ironic that there wasn't anything the slightest bit Chinese in this entire performance which included lots of music, dance and costumes.

Anyway, this made me wonder where Chinese culture has gone. With 5000 years of musical history, is there not one Chinese rap song that could have been included in this performance. So I did what any inquisitive individual would do in this modern day and age - I googled. There is of course Jin, a Chinese-American rapper who's had at least some degree of commercial success who's had some degree of commercial success. But I didn't find much so I went to a deeper research source - Youtube. Not too much there either, but I did find MC HotDog ( 姚中仁), a Taiwanese rapper who (based on my comprehensive Internet research) seems to be the closest thing China has to a rap star. So as they say in rapspeak- Yo! - check it:


Although I felt a little bit old watching all these young, energetic college students bustin' their moves (can you say that anymore?) to all the modern hippity hoppiest tunes, I felt better when the event ended with a dance to Earth Wind and Fire's hit Boogie Wonderland which goes back to my early youth.