Transcript: The Tragedy of Beijing Hip-hop, with Olivia Fu

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Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing with the show, please consider lending your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com. 

And listeners, please support my work at sinicapodcast.com. There you’ll find, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, a weekly essay from me, and now a wide range of offerings from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators – people like James Carter, who writes the This Week in China’s History column, Paul French with his Ultimate China Bookshelf, Andrew Methven with his Sinica Phrase of the Week, and, of course, the guys at the China Global South Project.

For a couple of years now, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of helping to organize Schwarzman College’s Capstone Showcase. For those of you who are not familiar with Schwarzman, it’s a one-year master’s program in Beijing, housed on a fantastic mini campus. Actually, it’s one big impressive building on the campus of Tsinghua University. It’s a highly selective program that draws just amazing students from all over the world, as well as great international faculty who rotate through, and Tsinghua professors as well. Each cohort is required to produce, either individually or in groups, a capstone project. And listeners might remember a show I did last year which featured three of the best ones that we heard that year.

This year, the event was in person. Last year it was just via Zoom. But I served as MC. More importantly, I was joined by really good friends and ideal judges — David Moser, the Peking polymath, who is familiar, no doubt, to all people who listen to this show; Iza Ding, a political scientist at Northwestern University, who’s also been on the show and just really dazzles with her intellect and her erudition; and Melinda Liu, who opened the Newsweek bureau in Beijing way back in the early ’80s, and is certainly among the longest serving and most highly regarded journalists working in China. I can’t even begin to describe how impressive the capstones were again this year, just as they were last year. So, I’ve reached out to a few of the Schwarzman graduates who we all thought did particularly great work and thought I’d invite some of them onto Sinica.

I want to kick off this week, since it’s summer and we have plenty of time for weighty topics come fall with the new school year beginning, with something really fun to end our summer. I’m delighted to welcome Olivia Fu, whose capstone project was called “All Eyez on Me: A Sociological Study on the Rise and Fall of Beijing Hip-hop.” Olivia, welcome to Sinica.

Olivia Fu: Thank you for having me, Kaiser.

Kaiser: Well, I’m really glad we could make time to do this. Olivia, the format of the Schwarzman Capstone Showcase allowed for only a very, very brief presentation, and not nearly enough time to get in all the questions that we all had about your work and about you personally. We didn’t get a chance to hear much about your personal story. So tell us a little bit about yourself, let me rectify this shortcoming of the format. Tell us about your background, your connection to China, what initially drew you to the Schwarzman program, and maybe what you’re doing now that Schwarzman is over.

Olivia: Yeah, of course. I think, also on the topic, I hope it’s fun, I could talk about it for hours, but my interest in hip-hop actually is out of left field. I had studied, actually, computer science and government at Harvard.