Some semi-useful lessons learned from five years in a small music company in Beijing:

1. The sites of progressive / radical values in China are not where you expect. Not all punk rockers and club heads are activists - they're just as likely to be Han supremacist nationalists.

1.5: So, a Beijinger's take on HK / Xinjiang is not a predictor of their views on, say, gender / sexuality. And vice versa!

A small, significant part of the Great Firewall's 'success' is creating a rhetorical separation of these issues and pushing them into context-poor silos.

2. Don't assume where someone stands from casual convo or public proclamations. Resistance takes unexpected forms.

Ill never forget: an apolitical friend showed me her mobile phone passcode: 6-4-8-9. She had to type that 100x a day. It was her constant reminder: to never forget

3. For many, a meaningful separation of work and life is impossible b/c Wechat has collapsed email, Slack, Skype, Whatsapp and Facebook behaviour into one app.

The consequence is a careful staging of life and work that can make work relnships FEEL 'fake' and passive-aggressive.

I'm sorry to report that there is 100% a Wechat group with all your co-workers except you.

4. When a cultural product is despised / dismissed, questions of class and class signifiers like 'taste' are often as relevant as questions of 'quality'. The same is true of beloved cultural products. For a PhD on this, look at Leah Dou fandom (Wong Faye and Dou Wei's daughter).

5. Anything done AT SCALE in China has next to zero chance of reflecting any progressive values, and must toe the govt line on everything from Taiwan to feminism. Exceptions are just sloppy enforcement. How this 'scale' moves and where it starts is 90% of music industry chat

6. As a result of 5., the richness, energy and vitality of the Beijing underground comes from events at an extremely small scale. A lot of this has retreated to semi-private / invite-only spaces. In this, Beijing is a lot like Delhi.

7. And finally, Chui Wan 吹万's 2015 self-titled album is the album of the decade. I mean, listen to this heartbreaker: https://chui-wan.bandcamp.com/track/silence