In the world, where is the best place to create rock music? According to Liu Lixin, the creator and boss of the former Beijing “Arsenal” heavy metal band, there is no better place than China. Now living in the United States, he told Epoch Times that the “forced and oppressed real experiences” in mainland China have nurtured his creative passion.
In 1999, Liu Lixin founded the heavy metal band “Arsenal” in Beijing with a few like-minded singers, and in 2004, he started operating the bar “13CLUB.” He loves performing in front of dozens or even hundreds of listeners with the banging sounds of heavy metal instruments, accompanied by colorful lights, singing original political songs that send shivers down your spine, such as “I Will Not Temporarily Reside in My Own Country,” “New Eight Honors and Disgraces,” “The People Need to Resist,” “I Oppose,” and more. Outside the bar, the police were always on standby, ready to rush in at any moment.
Leaving his parents at the age of 15, Liu Lixin drifted from Inner Mongolia to Beijing to join a rock band. Mastering excellent guitar playing skills, he excelled in rock songwriting and composition. Later, he opened a bar to provide a venue for performances, which propelled “Arsenal” to become one of Beijing’s top rock bands. Most of the band’s songs were written by him.
As a non-Beijing resident without local household registration, he had to renew his temporary residence permit every year to stay in Beijing. This made him feel a strong sense of “humiliation.” “I Will Not Temporarily Reside in My Own Country” was one of the songs created during that time. They had a blast singing in the bar, with the audience responding enthusiastically with whistles and applause.
In response to the then-party leader’s proposal of the “Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces,” Liu Lixin created “New Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces.” Singing live, he chants, “To awaken the people is an honor, to blindfold the people is a disgrace; to favor fair competition is an honor, to monopolize by the authorities is a disgrace; to uphold freedom of speech is an honor, to suppress dissent is a disgrace; to safeguard human rights is an honor, to have one-party rule is a disgrace…” This song full of politically sensitive words was often belted out in the bar.
A video showed a fiery scene during a performance of another song “Toppling that Wall”: hazy lights, booming accompaniment, with the lead singer shouting “Topple the firewall” word by word and knocking down a model firewall on the stage, exciting nearly two hundred fans. Liu Lixin said that day the police were stationed at the door, and the band members were nervous during filming. He instructed the staff to say he was not in if the police asked for him.
Industry insiders praised “Arsenal’s” works as “powerful and passionate,” witnessing the strength of Chinese heavy metal music. Despite the enthusiastic audience response, when they wanted to release an album, the songs had to be submitted for review, and unsurprisingly, were immediately banned by the cultural bureau. Not only did various publishers dare not release them again, but short video platforms like Douyin, Douban Music, and Youku also uniformly banned their songs.
Liu Lixin had many of his songs banned. When the Communist Party authorities discovered a band that so blatantly defied them under their noses, they began to investigate who the boss was and took covert actions.
Around 2017, a street office secretary from Zhongguancun, along with dozens of people from the fire, public security, health, and urban management teams, rushed to his bar with equipment and forcibly removed the signboard.
After participating in the Zhangbei Music Festival in 2009, the band was also banned from participating in large-scale performances by the cultural bureau. Band members were put on a blacklist, resulting in significant economic losses.
Moreover, the police started inquiring about who the boss was at the bar, and the employees always replied that the boss was not in and could be reached by phone. Liu Lixin also avoided talking to the police until one day he had to face them. He told the police he was the boss.
Subsequently, the trouble began. Police cars were parked in front of the bar all day, harassing and threatening, seemingly ready to barge in and stop the performances at any time. He spent hundreds of thousands of yuan annually renting the bar, yet the landlord suddenly requested to terminate the lease. He realized that the police in the Zhongguancun police station were intimidating the landlord. “The only thing they can use against me is my landlord, not letting him rent to me.”
The owner of the adjacent bar, an American, told Liu Lixin that with one-sixth of the world’s population being Chinese, there should be a proportionate number of rock stars, but this was far from reality.
“This comes back to the issue of freedom of speech; the restriction of speech limits creativity, affecting it greatly. This applies to other industries as well,” Liu Lixin said. Before the 709 incident in 2015, he still had fantasies about developing the rule of law, democracy, and constitutionalism under the CCP’s rule; after that, he felt increasingly unsafe in China. In 2018, realizing the danger, Liu Lixin fled to the United States. Years later, his bar was forced to close.
Liu Lixin is not the first Chinese rock musician to flee abroad. In 2004, during the peak of their fame, the “Pangu Band” performed in Taiwan, and their homes in China were ransacked, forcing them into collective exile.
Liu Lixin believes that Chinese rock music has lost its soul because rock music is about expressing true feelings. “It requires independence, and most importantly, criticism. That is the essence of rock music. True rock music needs to have a critical eye, saying NO, not YES. As your influence grows, the CCP will inevitably target you.”
He cited the example of the “Father of Chinese Rock” Cui Jian, who once sang “Nothing to My Name” at Tiananmen Square before the June Fourth incident and was repeatedly banned by the authorities.
After coming to the United States, Liu Lixin continued his songwriting on topics he cared about. After the Jiangyou incident, he composed a folk song called “If You Can’t Lead at the Forefront.” In a YouTube video, he played the guitar and sang, encouraging more Chinese people to stand up against tyranny and reject collaboration with the CCP.
“I hope my family and compatriots can live in a free society. I hope China can one day become a democratic society like Taiwan and Japan, a society without the Chinese Communist Party,” Liu Lixin said. ◇