This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
It was late one night in September, but the Beijing subway was still noisy and crowded. Most of the passengers were young commuters returning home from work. Ken was sitting in a corner of the carriage and didn’t know exactly how it happened.
“It seemed like someone standing in the middle of the carriage began to sing and some others joined him,” Ken said. “By the time I noticed it, half of the passengers were singing together.”
The song was called “I Finally Believed in Fate”. A video later circulated online with subtitles, although these differed from what they sang, Ken recalled. Ken and I are chatting over Signal, myself in Australia and Ken still in Beijing. “Such songs are called depressing songs. It is all about frustration and pain,” he said. “But there’s no one to blame and nothing that can be done.”
I’m tired of the unfairness of the world I’m tired of false love I’ve broken the vinegar bottle of life There’s so much pain in my heart I’m all alone in a foreign land Who can I tell my heart to? I dried my tears and my heart broke I finally believed in fate
In recent years, such things happen frequently, perhaps out of a momentary burst of emotion, or possibly a planned action. Many songs are sung, including “I Finally Believed in Fate”, or “People Without Dreams Won’t Be Sad” or “When I’m Done With All This Suffering”. These songs are popular among young people, but cannot reach the top of the charts because they mostly express “negative emotions” that the Chinese government does not like: frustration, pain and a sense of powerlessness that “no matter what I do, I can’t change my destiny.”
The voice of youth
This is a small yet important entry point to gain insight into Chinese lives. These songs illustrate the real feelings of the younger generation, and prove that discontent and anger are growing. To avoid censorship, these songs employ semantic ambiguities like “the earth” or “the world”. It’s not difficult to see where their anger is directed: the government. When they gather on platforms and in carriages to sing, it is not just to complain; it is a form of resistance. It is far from shaking Beijing’s rule, but enough to fissure the iron wall through which a little light can shine.
Listening to these songs was a new experience for me. I was born in 1974, not long before Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution. Several years later, the country turned its eyes from “class struggle” to making money. I witnessed the so-called “Chinese Miracle” over the next four decades. Although it was still a communist country, our incomes rose, and China became the world factory. Countless skyscrapers were built, and almost everyone had a smartphone. At the same time we still didn’t have the right to vote or much freedom of expression.
We have sung countless songs over the past four decades, including the cringe-worthy “O Party, My Dear Mom” and “The Sun the Reddest, Chairman Mao the Dearest”. Even decades on from Chairman Mao’s passing, this song can be heard anytime and anywhere in China. But the most popular songs are, unsurprisingly, positive and uplifting. We sang “Tomorrow Will Be Better” in the 1980s and “Let our smiles/filled with youthful pride/ let’s look forward to a better tomorrow”. We sang “My Future Is Not A Dream” in the 1990s and “I know/ my future is not a dream/ I seriously live in every minute”. “I want to Fly Higher” was popular in the first decade of the new millennium. “I know the kind of happiness I am looking for/ is up there in the sky/ I want to fly higher”, it went. These songs expressed our true feelings, and also proved that even in this autocratic country, people can still have hope.
Over the years, there have also been many songs of loss and sadness, mostly related to love, homesickness or reminiscence. Brave singers like the rock musician Li Zhi sang “It is the best of times, and people don’t need freedom” to express dissatisfaction with the political system. Li even dared to go near Tiananmen: “Now this square is my grave,” he sang. “Everything is just a dream.” His music gained traction and suffered the fate of a lot of contentious music that became popular – it was silenced. His channels were blocked from all avenues online. He even briefly disappeared. He’s hardly reaching commuters on the subway today.
Still, try as the government might to control music and use it to channel positivity, it fights against the long tradition within Chinese society of singing songs of despair, anguish and denouncement.
It’s hard to know exactly when the new trend for depressing songs began. Some songs have been banished from social media, while others perhaps never caught on. What is certain, however, is that Xi Jinping’s new era is a major reason for the creation of these songs. Years of anti-market economic policies and the brutal lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic have led to the closure of many Chinese companies. The super affluent have fled, the middle class have become poor, and the poor have become penniless. In many cities, it’s now easy to find young people who, unable to find a job and with no clear sense of where to go, end up sleeping on the street.
Laying flat
Xi’s administration has damaged not only China’s economy – it has also destroyed the hope and confidence of the Chinese people, especially of the younger generation. No matter how much the communist propaganda machine boasts, life for young people is getting harder and harder. Job struggles feed into other challenges; it’s difficult to afford a house, raise children, and live a decent life like their parents did, while a single illness can wipe out the savings of many for half, or even their entire, lives. Words like “dream” or “future” no longer inspire and frustration has swept across the country. Tang ping (Laying flat) has become a popular term to reflect a new trend – those who are rejecting the rat race in favour of a more ascetic, monastic life: no house, no car, no children, no falling in love, no getting married.
Against this backdrop, these new songs appeared. “I’ve Been In This World” gained traction in 2022. A year later it was “When I’m Done With All This Suffering”, “So You Said, Sweetness Will Follow Bitterness” and “The Age When Sugar Is Not Sweet”. Then in 2024 it was “I Finally Believed in Fate”, the one sung on the subway.
Probably fearing his work would be deleted, the author of “I Finally Believed in Fate” released a completely contrary version online, with the original “I’m tired of the unfairness of the world” changed to “I realised that fate is the fairest of all!” Unsurprisingly, the new version is not as popular as the old. Anyone who knows China well can easily understand the concern he felt.
The sound of resistance
In countries like China, protests are often moderate and meek rather than violent, with many people kneeling, crying and pleading in front of government buildings when they are treated unfairly. But even these “kneeling protests” are often met with violent evictions, beatings or arrests. Singing a sad song on a subway doesn’t seem like a risqué thing to do for most, but the young people who composed and sang them have crossed a government red line. The Orwellian Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will not sit idly by. Already many songs have been “cancelled” and many videos of the subway chorus have disappeared. Still, for young people, the loss of jobs, opportunities and hope is more important. Many will not be halted by fear, and will continue to sing the depressing songs rather than “O Party, My Dear Mom”.
In the post-pandemic era, young Chinese people have initiated many unexpected actions: crawling on all fours through campuses in the dead of night, and riding bicycles to another city in numbers of up to 500,000, until the government forcibly stopped it. From time to time, there are extremely tragic actions taken, such as group suicides. And let’s not forget the famous “White Paper Revolution”, in which many young people took to the streets holding up blank sheets of paper to express their unspeakable anger. Because of this, Xi’s regime ended its brutal Covid-zero policy in an undignified and haphazard manner.
Like these actions, composing depressing songs and singing them in public places is a way for young people to demonstrate their will to resist, and this resistance will not stop because of the government’s intimidation and repression.
Ken lives alone in a small room in a rented apartment beyond Beijing’s 5th Ring Road, on the outskirts of the city. He doesn’t have many friends and desperately wants to fall in love. He’s now ready to leave Beijing because he feels “too tired and couldn’t realise any dreams”. But what he saw and heard on the subway last September inspired him. He’s now writing his own melancholy song called “May Every Good Person Have a Good Death”. Although it’s still inchoate, he hopes to find someone to compose the music for it and post it online so that more people can hear his voice.
He expands on how much the scene on the subway touched him. “I almost missed my station, and I kept thinking about it. I used to feel lonely, and even had a thought that death might be an easier way to live, but at that moment, I suddenly realised that I wasn’t that lonely.” A hint of a smile appears on Ken’s face. “I still have comrades – many, many comrades.”
Cultural boycotts are no simple matter, as the Boardmasters surfing and music festival in Cornwall discovered this summer.
Traditionally one of the fixed points of the post-exam season, this year the organisers faced the knotty decision of whether or not to cancel the controversial act, Bob Vylan. The pro-Palestinian punk provocateurs had already caused a media storm (and embarrassment for the BBC) after the band’s frontman, who confusingly uses the stage name Bobby Vylan (the drummer is Bobbie Vylan), called on the crowd at Glastonbury to join him in a chant of “death, death to the IDF”, a reference to the Israeli Defence Forces.
In the run-up to the festival, which took place in early August, Jewish campaigners had called on the organisers to cancel the band’s appearance, as other festivals have done. Where this gets complicated is that Boardmasters is owned by Superstruct Entertainment, which was acquired last year by investment company KKR.
Now, apart from operating more than 80 festivals across the world, KKR also invests in Israeli tech, which makes it a prime target for the anti-Zionist Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement.
So, while Bob Vylan were preparing to go onstage in Newquay to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people, others were flexing their anti-Zionist credentials by boycotting the festival altogether. Bristol band The Menstrual Cramps objected, among other things, to Israeli surfers taking part in the festival: “We believe in a cultural boycott of Israel, which means not spotlighting Israelis at a festival during a genocide.”
UK garage DJ Conducta also pulled out, citing KKR’s “direct investments in weapons manufacturers and financial ties to the state of Israel.” American act The Blessed Madonna pulled out after being asked to sign a “shop-stop” agreement to restrict political messaging. “I ain’t signing shit. Free Palestine,” she said.
The boycotts went ahead despite Boardmasters issuing a statement distancing themselves from its investors: “We don’t support or align with investments or actions that contradict our core values of fairness, integrity, inclusivity, and excellence. Our integrity is not for sale.” Boardmasters claimed it had proved its anti-Zionist credentials by refusing to cancel Bob Vylan.
The culture wars also hit the Edinburgh Fringe this year when Jewish comedians Philip Simon and Rachel Creagar had their shows cancelled over staff safety fears following the appearance pro-Palestinian graffiti at the venue Whistle Binkies. Alternative venues were later found but not before UK Lawyers for Israel, an organisation which uses legal means to campaign for the removal of any material it considers to be “anti-Israel”, described the cancellations as “a racist move that echoes 1930s Nazi Germany”.
The festival later ran into trouble over an interview with the Deputy First Minister of Scotland, Kate Forbes, who has strongly held “gender-critical” views based on her Christian faith. The venue, Summerhall, later issued a statement saying Forbes’s appearance had been an “oversight,” and she would not be invited to speak at future events. They claimed the presence of the Scottish politician affected staff safety and wellbeing.
The issue is not restricted to UK festivals. The Toronto International Film Festival pulled the Canadian film The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, about the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 over concerns about clearance of footage taken by the terrorists. Again, staff safety was invoked in the justification of the decision. After an international outcry, the festival issued an apology and reinstated the film in the programme.
Each of these examples demonstrates a deep confusion on the part of festival organisers about what these cultural events are actually for.
Boardmasters ended up in the absurd position of parading its support for free expression of a band that called for the death of Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, the Edinburgh venues failed to understand that genuine cultural diversity includes people with whom we disagree. At their best, festivals should be places where people have their prejudices challenged not reinforced.
In today’s world of hot takes and moral outrage, we all want clear answers – good, bad, right and wrong – and people we can easily rally behind or blast – villain, victim, hero, heretic. But the cases of Kneecap, Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa have resisted such clarity, and they’ve forced us to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: freedom of expression, especially in moments of deep political pain and division, isn’t always neat, easy or even popular.
First a recap for those who might have missed the stories or got lost in the details:
At the end of April, Belfast band Kneecap came under fire following the circulation of videos in which the group appears to endorse political violence, declaring “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP,” and another showing apparent support for Hezbollah and Hamas, both proscribed as terrorist organisations in the UK. Kneecap insists their remarks were taken out of context, that their tone was satirical and that they do not in fact support these groups. Nevertheless, they are under police investigation and have had several of their shows dropped, following political pressure from MPs including Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party.
Meanwhile Jonny Greenwood, best known as a member of Radiohead, and his collaborator, Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, said this week that they were scheduled to perform two concerts in the UK in June. The events have since been cancelled due to serious and credible threats that made the performances unsafe. The cancellations followed calls from organisations aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Tassa and Greenwood had previously performed together in Tel Aviv in 2024 and Tassa had performed for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza at the end of 2023. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, who have called them out in the past, criticised the planned UK concerts as a form of “artwashing genocide” and welcomed news of their cancellation.
Greenwood has denounced the cancellations as censorship, while prominent artists such as Massive Attack have rallied behind Kneecap, framing the backlash they faced as part of a broader attempt to suppress dissent.
These are not simple cases. In the case of Kneecap, their rhetoric was inflammatory and, in invoking violence against politicians, reckless – two MPs have been murdered in this country in recent years after all. Their potential valorisation of Hamas and Hezbollah was far from funny – these groups are guilty of grave human rights violations. Kneecap have tried to deflect attention from their actions by saying that they are not the story and that Gaza is, but people should be free to challenge them and their views. It’s reductionist to say that doing so is somehow taking the focus away from Gaza.
And yet irreverence, political provocation and even transgressive speech have long been cornerstones of artistic expression. Search bands with the word “kill” in their name or album title and you won’t walk away short on examples. Whether Kneecap’s comments were satire or poor judgment, a response in the form of a criminal investigation raises important questions about proportionality and the appropriate limits of state intervention. The European Court of Human Rights has made clear that criminal sanctions should be a last resort in speech cases, and indeed the UK’s legal structures place a high bar on what constitutes incitement. Have the members of Kneecap met this threshold? It’s hard to see that they have.
Likewise, while boycotts are a legitimate form of protest, and protest is an essential pillar of free expression, they too can become a vehicle for coercion. The Greenwood–Tassa concerts were not silenced by public disagreement but by threats credible enough to endanger the performers, venue staff and audiences. That is not protest, it is intimidation.
Cultural boycotts specifically have other free speech complications too: while they typically target authoritarian regimes with the intention of effecting positive change, they can silence the very voices that are most helpful to the cause. In 1975, Index surveyed artists on their views about boycotting Apartheid South Africa and the general response was that it would do more harm than good. “Governments would not go to such lengths to secure silence if they did not fear speech,” said one respondent. “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,” said another.
The truth is neither of the current UK situations present a clean clash between good speech and bad. Instead, they sit in an uncomfortable space where moral outrage, political solidarity and artistic freedom collide. Kneecap’s defenders are right to argue that Gaza must remain in focus; they’re wrong to say that this exempts artists from accountability for everything they say. Conversely, critics of Israel and its supporters must be free to speak and protest, but not through threats that endanger lives or undermine the very democratic principles they claim to defend.
At Index, we believe in a broad and inclusive approach to free expression. The right to speak must extend even to those whose views we find offensive, provocative or politically inconvenient. While this does not mean freedom from criticism, it does mean freedom from coercion and violence.
No artist is entitled to a stage and venues shouldn’t be beholden to host certain acts if the situation changes. However, when access to platforms is denied because the views, or even the identity, of the artists are politically contentious, something essential is lost. It becomes harder for culture to serve as a space of honest confrontation and productive dialogue, and easier for fear and conformity to set the limits of what is permissible.
Ultimately, for freedom of expression to mean anything, it must apply to everyone, not just those with whom we agree. Ideas must be challenged, yes, and artists held accountable too, but never through threat and only through the justice system when a high bar has been met. Greenwood said he was sad that those supporting Kneecap’s “freedom of expression are the same ones most determined to restrict ours”. His words are a warning: if you cheer shutting down space for one group, don’t be alarmed when the space of those you want to hear is shut down too.
Norwegian musician Moddi’s new album, Unsongs, is made up of renditions of songs from around the world that had been banned, censored or silenced. Unsongs includes cover versions of songs from countries including China, Russia, Mexico and Vietnam, on topics such as drugs, war and religion.
Index on Censorship caught up with Moddi on Twitter to find out more.
Moddi will hand over the stage at three of the biggest gigs on his current European tour to unleash the power of free expression, replacing the support band with the genuinely banned.
In Amsterdam on 1 October, Maryam Al-Khawaja will share her and her family’s story of imprisonment and exile in the struggle for democracy in Bahrain. In London on 3 October, Vanessa Berhe will speak about life in the prison state of Eritrea and her campaign One Day Seyoum fighting to free her journalist uncle Seyoum Tsehaye who has been in jail for 15 years. In Berlin on 6 October, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently will tell how the Syrian civil war has destroyed the free expression of a generation. Co-founder Abdalaziz Alhamza will share the story of how and why he co-founded it inside IS-controlled territory.
