Arrested, hooded and handcuffed, members of China’s In3 group spent five days in prison – their punishment for falling foul of Beijing’s authoritarianism

Chen Haoran knew he was not liked by the authorities.

As a founding member of China’s most banned band – the hip-hop group In3 – he had come to expect the prying eyes of the country’s police and intelligence services.



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Indeed his songs had been labelled a moral menace. Of a list of 120 tunes forbidden by the ministry of culture last year – songs which “trumpet obscenity, violence, crime or harm social morality” – 17 were by In3.



But Chen did not expect what happened to him and his bandmate Jia Wei in September.



Following an intense crackdown on dissent in the arts since president Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 police had made it almost impossible for In3 to play gigs, regularly telling venues to cancel bookings.



However, the band had managed to play a show in Yunnan province, southwest China, and had just landed back in Beijing when plain clothes police officers boarded their jet.



Chen and Jia were handcuffed, had black bags placed over their heads and were bundled off.



“I thought that if I moved I might die so I stayed put without saying a word,” says Chen. “I thought: ‘The only thing I can do is wait’.”



They were driven for three hours to a detention centre.



“We were taken to a room where many others were sat on chairs, heads towards the wall, hands cuffed behind them,” says Chen. “When names were read out they went for interrogation. It smelled like a place where elephants live.”



The band members were questioned about drugs, with Chen admitting to his interrogators that he had smoked cannabis in Yunnan.



“I told them that our culture is like that: smoking and having a drink, not causing trouble,” he says. “The police got mad, saying, ‘How dare you say that’s a culture, do you still want to sing in the future?’.”



Chen says he was separated from Jia and locked in a cell containing at least 20 other people. Intense lights were left on constantly. A sign on the wall said that detainees could have two hours of exercise outside per day, but none were brave enough to ask for it.



“The latest prisoners to arrive slept by the toilet, but if you looked nice [too soft] you ended up sleeping there all the time,” says Chen. “We weren’t allowed to sleep on our stomachs or sides because police feared we’d commit suicide in that position, somehow.”



Chen says he quickly realised that cannabis use was not the reason for his detention.



“The police said they had been watching us for a long time and that the only reason they didn’t detain us was because we hadn’t played shows until then,” he says.



The pair were released after five days without charge.



Chen’s story is remarkable only in the detail he is able to provide and for the position he and his band hold in China’s cultural life.



In fact, he is just the latest person to fall victim to an expanding government offensive against perceived immorality and those deemed to be threats to the Communist party leadership. Since Xi came to power activists, human rights lawyers, bloggers, journalists, academics, publishers and artists have all been targeted.



In contrast to the current chilly environment, In3’s softly antagonistic lyrics were tolerated under Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao.



The arts climate changed drastically after Xi took power in 2012, as the president moved to consolidate his power and silence dissenters.



In October 2012 he horrified liberal Chinese artists when he laid out his roadmap for the arts to call on them to spread “positive energy” and the party’s “core socialist values” with their work.

The extent of authorities’ sensitivity to artistic dissent was underlined last May when artist Dai Jianyong was detained for distributing mildly amusing images of the president with a moustache.



Meanwhile Beijing’s annual Independent Film Festival is regularly shut down.



In3, who released their debut album Unknown Artists in 2008 then their second, Born To Be Rappers, in 2013, started feeling the crackdown about two years before they were detained.



“We booked performances for companies then they’d receive documents saying we weren’t allowed to perform because our lyrics had ‘negative energy’,” says Chen. “Police went to venues with lyrics circled in red pen, saying the shows should be cancelled. We got fewer and fewer invitations. We didn’t feel scared, just puzzled.”



What made In3’s detainment confusing to an outsider was the lack of shock-factor their music has.



Their song Hello Teacher, which topped the ministry’s blacklist, features swearing plus lyrics about spitting in a teacher’s drink and drawing penises on textbooks.

Beijing Evening News

, another song on the list, features the lyrics, “Some sleep in subway underpasses, others eat out on government expenses.” It’s arguably anti-establishment, but hardly N.W.A.’s Fuck Tha Police.



But for Chen, puzzled by the hard line police are taking with his band, the pressure on him has taken its intended toll.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chen says the band will not perform again. Photograph: Giulia Marchi

In3 have no plans to perform live again and Jia is lying low abroad.



The band recently recorded new material in Atlanta at the studio owned by Outkast rapper Big Boi. However, Chen says he’s likely to just release “more mature” instrumental music from now on to avoid stirring trouble with authorities. With a young family to look after, he doesn’t want any hassle.



There was a surge in online interest in the band last August, but only as a result of curious netizens searching for information about the band the ministry had declared were so immoral. Chen is aggrieved that he is seemingly being punished for the content of old songs, many of which were released last decade.



“We wrote those long ago,” he says. “We were just like a mirror, reflecting society. It was just because of pressure that we wrote these songs in the first place. Without that pressure, we wouldn’t have composed rebellious music at all.



“I felt puzzled – if I’m a bad student it’s justified for the teacher to hate me. If I’m a criminal it’s justified for police to hate me. I don’t know why people want revenge on us. We’re not angry teenagers now. Even if we were, we don’t want to cause trouble so we’d approach things in a wiser way. If authorities found something wrong with our lyrics I’d just change them.”



If In3 continues at all it will be in blunted form, releasing self-censored music and refraining from gigging lest they be detained again. With the arts crackdown showing no signs of abating, Chen sees little point in fighting back.



“Even if the ban is too much no one dares argue,” he says. “If I try to justify myself police would tell me to save time and talk in prison instead.”

