MC Tianyou Is Banned Across Every Platform, and a Hanmai Idol's Career Stops Dead

The song that broke the rules was banned two years ago. Nothing new on the record explains why a performer who had already made his compromises still had to be pulled off the air.

Li Tianyou has disappeared.

Search "Tianyou" on YY and the platform reports no streamer by that name. Before 5 p.m. on February 12, you could still reach Tianyou's page on YY by typing in the full URL; soon even that link returned a 404. If you want to know who this person is, all that is left on the internet is a handful of videos and a few written reports.

So a public figure with 20 million followers on YY and 30 million on Kuaishou vanished almost overnight.

What sets Li Tianyou apart from the celebrities "banned" before him is that his fame rested entirely on the virtual internet. That virtual world paid him enough to prove his own worth many times over, yet the odd gap between online prosperity and a cold reality still led him, more than once, to talk about how strange his line of work was:

"Say someone takes the money and runs, or the website goes under — what are you supposed to do then? Will you still be the king sitting up on his throne?"

What had worried him was the limits that came with the platform. "The platform is a dead thing, but people are alive. I [Tianyou] am also trying a lot of different channels to develop myself. Nobody can guarantee any one platform stays hot forever, and livestreaming has its limits after all."

He probably did not expect the turn to be this complete. In the early hours of February 12, the tech outlet BiaNews reported that the relevant authorities, together with several other departments, had summoned the major livestreaming platforms to a meeting on the evening of February 11 and ordered a ban on a number of streamers, among them MC Tianyou on YY and the Douyu streamer known as Wuwukai.

The crackdown does not appear to be aimed at hanmai — a shouted, chant-like performance style, literally "shouting into the mic" — itself. On the afternoon of February 12, YY still had a dedicated hanmai section, with more than 20 rooms broadcasting live. The jokes kept coming and the gifts kept flowing, apparently untouched by the news of MC Tianyou's ban.

QDaily asked Douyu, Inke, and other livestreaming platforms to confirm the report. As of publication, Douyu said: "Under the previous disciplinary decision, 'Wuwukai' remains suspended from streaming. Douyu will strictly follow the government's guidance in regulating this" — but it did not address the report of a ban directly, and no other platform had responded.

Li Tianyou is better known, of course, as "MC Tianyou" — but he had already dropped that name. On January 26, 2018, YY issued a notice that no streamer's nickname or broadcast title could contain the words "MC" or "hanmai," and published a list of 77 hanmai songs that streamers were barred from performing on the platform. After that, MC Tianyou changed his Weibo name to his given name, Li Tianyou, and MC Azhe's Weibo account became "My name is Azhe."

All day on February 12, calls to Li Tianyou's phone went unanswered.

In today's slang, Li Tianyou is a shehuiren, a streetwise tough. He is not yet 24 this year, and was born in Jinzhou, Liaoning Province. While he was in elementary school, his parents were laid off from a state-owned pharmaceutical factory. He dropped out of middle school, later joined the army, could not take the beatings and abuse in the ranks, and ran off six months before his term was up. He performed street dance and sold fried chicken cutlets, and at 20, while dealing used cars, he happened to hear a hanmai song and made up his mind to become an "MC."

One of his best-known songs is still Listen Up, Women (《女人们你们听好了》): "This recording is dedicated to those women / who betrayed us men for money / In the real world there's a substance called money / and a kind of human being called woman," and "Your natural beauty has bought you a lifetime of wealth / but have you ever thought about men? / You don't understand men / maybe you don't understand men who aren't rich second-generation kids and still have nothing to their name."

The style of Li Tianyou's work, the huge success that came with it, and the way he spent his money made him a subject the media enjoyed discussing. Before him, content this explicit had never gone mainstream, even though in real life it has deep and long-standing roots among ordinary people. The internet amplified the power of a niche culture that had perhaps never expected its audience to grow so large.

In February 2016, Kuaishou's cumulative user count passed 300 million. In April 2017, data from Aurora Mobile showed YY Live's daily active users reaching 4.36 million. A report from Penguin Intelligence found that in September 2016, 47% of mobile livestreaming users came from third- and fourth-tier cities and below, and that the audience was moving from third- and fourth-tier cities toward first- and second-tier ones. Another survey, from Tencent Fashion, showed that 18.8% of livestreaming users came from the eastern coastal region and 53.2% from the central and western regions and the three northeastern provinces.

This kind of performance, known as "hanmai," succeeded alongside the livestreaming products themselves.

Arcbering Consulting, a marketing consultancy in Silicon Valley, argued in an analysis that hanmai probably caught on in China for three reasons: it stirs and echoes people's wish to let off pressure, much as rap did in its earliest form; it is simple and easy to follow; and — the most important reason — the growth of China's livestreaming business gave hanmai performers very good conditions.

"With his crude jokes and improvised bits mocking modern life, Li Tianyou has become a hero to a discontented younger generation in China's small cities and rural areas, many of whom resent elites, distrust authority, and long to escape dull, low-paying jobs." That was The New York Times's summary in its report on "MC Tianyou."

When QDaily republished that article under license, quite a few readers left puzzled comments: how could you report on someone like this?

Another quarrel came from a running feud with hip-hop, which raised the profile of both.

Rapper Mrweezy, who runs the Holy Temple label, said of hanmai: "You can't even call it a musical form. It's just some strange thing cooked up by Chinese farmers, village bosses, villagers, and poorly educated people in second- and third-tier cities."

Li Tianyou saw it differently: "Hanmai and rap are still different — rap has a bit more depth — but both have been looked down on. When rap first caught on in China it was underground, and nobody supported it. What is this, people said, all this mumbling nonsense coming out of your mouth? And that early rap was full of foul language, pretty much the same as hanmai is now. Hanmai is changing too. People are pulling the foul language back and writing about their own stories and their own lives."

MC originally stood for Microphone Controller, the person who controls the mic. At underground hip-hop parties in the United States in the 1970s, a host would often introduce the DJs on hand with lines written in advance or made up on the spot, and these hosts came to be called MCs. Because the linking lines were usually delivered in a rap-like way, "MC" gradually became a synonym for rapper. Taiwan's earliest rappers, MC Hotdog among them, used the "MC" title to mark themselves as rappers.

When hip-hop culture first reached China, the so-called MCs in nightclubs could not rap at all. Over dance tracks a DJ mixed from pop songs and blunt drum beats, they would shout things like "How's everybody doing tonight?" This rough, easy style of music spread through pirated CDs and the internet, and slowly turned into the earliest form of hanmai songs.

"Shitou," regarded as China's first hanmai performer, met the form under these circumstances and, with no idea what "MC" meant, gave himself the title MC Shitou. That is one of the things the rap world holds against the hanmai world. The Beijing rapper "Shuangzi" has said hanmai has no lineage, that its performers always pass themselves off as musicians, and that everybody puts "MC" in front of his name — a bad habit Shitou started.

Before livestreaming existed, rap and hanmai were both popular in voice chat rooms as part of the "voice five events." "Playing the five events" was a special PK, or player-versus-player, culture in voice chat rooms, in which participants, set to music, traded chanted lines in five styles: sanke (freeform trash talk), taoci (set verbal routines), MC, rap, and "alternative." The voice five events began on the JiuLiao voice chat software and later spread to voice tools such as UT, IS, and YY. Sanke, taoci, and the "alternative" style, which consisted mainly of insults, were later banned; rap and MC-style hanmai survived.

It is worth noting that hanmai, still an unrecognized musical form, has a far more mature business model than hip-hop. On a Tencent Video original program, Li Tianyou said his after-tax annual income was around 80 million yuan. A September 2017 report by The New York Times put his annual income from livestream fan tips at more than $2 million, or about 12.6 million yuan.

The business of hanmai runs on a complicated set of rules.

Li Tianyou's income does not come from him alone. A report by GQ noted that in April 2016 he set up his own company and signed more than 200 streamers. That is the same arrangement as between a "guild" and its streamers on YY: the guild pours money in to turn a streamer into a star, and takes a cut in return.

On the surface, so-called tuhao — nouveau-riche big spenders — shower a streamer with lavish gifts in the room, and once the mood is up, ordinary viewers pile in too; on a single night the gifts can be worth more than 100,000 yuan. In reality, most streamers are signed to a guild and split their income with it, and a large share of these guilds were founded by the very tuhao doing the spending. So the money a tuhao spends flows back through the streamer's earnings, and the people actually footing the bill are the ordinary viewers the tuhao worked up into spending.

Guilds use the same method to raise new streamers. With cheap gift-boosting, a streamer can shoot up the platform's rankings and draw more viewers. Once the following reaches 10 million or so, a money-making streamer is born. A streamer at that level can then use lianmai, a live linked call, to talk with newer streamers on air and lift their profile. Lianmai has a set price: talking to MC Tianyou once costs 13,140 yuan — ten gifts priced at "1314" yuan each.

By YY's own figures, its global revenue in 2016 was about 8 billion yuan. That same year the whole livestreaming industry took in 15 billion yuan, across categories from gaming to singing to dancing. Hanmai was only one of them.

No surprise, then, that on regulation hanmai and hip-hop seem to have reached the same destination by different roads.

In early 2018, official outlets including People's Daily, Xinhuanet, and the Communist Youth League Central Committee published pieces saying the lyrics of the hip-hop artist PG One spread the wrong values. PG One apologized on Weibo on January 4, writing that "in my early exposure to hip-hop culture I was deeply influenced by Black music, and my understanding of its core values was skewed," and adding, "I have now taken my work down across every platform of my own accord. Thank you to the public for the oversight. The spirit of hip-hop should always be peace and love."

More news of the crackdown on hip-hop followed. A batch of artists had their work taken down or scrubbed of offending lyrics; GAI, joint champion of The Rap of China (《中国有嘻哈》), withdrew from Singer (《歌手》); Vava's scenes on Happy Camp (《快乐大本营》) were cut. Hip-hop became all but invisible in mainstream channels. After one summer of explosive fame, it was gone.

Under pressure from regulators, hip-hop and hanmai performers alike fell into line. PG One apologized on Weibo. GAI changed his Weibo name from "GAI Ye Only Cares About Money" to "GAI Zhouyan," and led a whole studio audience in chanting "Long live the motherland" on I Want to Be on the Spring Festival Gala (《我要上春晚》). Sun Bayi released a rap song called Glorious China (《辉煌中国》).

On an episode of The Orator (《演说家》), Li Tianyou described, humbly, how he brings comfort to people whose lives have not gone well. GAI turned up in Good Luck Coming (《好运来》), the promotional song for the film Never Say Die (《羞羞的铁拳》), trying to blend into a more mainstream crowd.

As early as September 2017, in an interview with The New York Times, Li Tianyou said he knew that people like him did not stand on firm ground, and that he had already cleaned up his act. He also said he worried that online livestreaming could harm Chinese society by promoting violence and foul language.

From 2016 on, entertainment on the internet could no longer grow as it pleased.

First the web dramas Go Princess Go (《太子妃升职记》), in which a man wakes up in a woman's body, and Addicted (《上瘾》), a gay-themed drama, were both pulled. Then, because its jokes went too far, the first episode of Roast! (《吐槽大会》) season one was taken down three days after it went up. Next came the web dramas Yu Zui (《余罪》), Crime Eliminator (《灭罪师》), and The Dark Ones (《暗黑者》) — all crime shows.

Regulation tightened in 2017. Entertainment gossip outfits of the sort run by Zhuo Wei's Fengxing Studio, current-affairs talk shows in the mold of Behind the Headlines with Wentao (《锵锵三人行》), even the cultural program Letters Alive (《见字如面》) season two, were suspended, taken offline, or banned outright.

Li Tianyou's grasp of where the line ran was, in the end, too shallow.

On the evening of February 12, Focus Report (《焦点访谈》) aired a new episode titled Cracking Down Hard on Online Chaos (《重拳打击网络乱象》), which said the online streamer Tianyou had used a rap-style delivery during his broadcasts to describe in detail the various sensations of taking drugs. Citing the relevant regulations, the Cyberspace Administration of China imposed a cross-platform ban on the offending streamers Tianyou and Lu Benwei.

Focus Report used to air every night at 7:40, once the most nerve-racking 30 minutes of the day for corrupt officials.

One of Li Tianyou's songs runs, "Sorrow rolls across the weathered tin foil," "life is short, better get one hit while you can," "inhale hard and don't let go, your spirits rise" — lines taken as encouraging drug use. Back in 2015 the song had already been placed on the Ministry of Culture's blacklist of 120 banned songs. In other words, it had been out of circulation for more than two years.

At 6:26 p.m. on February 12, Li Tianyou liked a Weibo post PG One had published on January 1 this year. PG One wrote it after appearing in Zhejiang TV's New Year's Eve show: "Thanks to Jiangsu TV, thanks to 2017, looking forward to 2018, happy new year everyone."

That was the last post PG One made before announcing he was pulling his songs from every platform. It was also the last public gesture Li Tianyou made after news of his ban broke — and before long, the like disappeared too.

Open YY Live now and you see a line of green text: YY officially advocates "green," wholesome livestreaming and monitors its content around the clock; any account spreading illegal, non-compliant, vulgar, or violent material will be suspended.