China’s Dance Rebellion: From The Roaring ‘20s In Harlem To COVID-19 Beijing
While the rest of the world was in and out of lockdown during the not-so-roaring pandemic of the early 2020s, a small enclave in Beijing had folks sweating, holding strangers’ hands and dancing to jazz that crackled in the stagnant air of bars and basements like lightning.
Sometimes they did so legally. Other times, illegal events were shut down midway by the authorities. Dancers didn’t much care about flaunting the rules, though — as long as they could find release in the rebellious, holy spirit of swing dance.
Whether it be the scene of 2020s Beijing or 1920s Harlem, where African Americans first invented the dance, swing symbolizes free-spiritedness for the repressed.
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“For some, [this] social dance was a reprieve from the harsh economic realities and the drudgery of earning a living,” the Kennedy Center said about the Lindy Hop, a form of swing dance made popular in the 1920s and 30s. “It was a way for people to celebrate, to escape, to express their identity.”
Renaissance writer J. A. Rogers likewise noted: “The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow — from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.”
In other words, there can be no free spirit without consideration of the soul.
Alongside the arts, religion was also central to the Harlem Renaissance, whether it be the Black Social Gospel movement or intellectuals like James Weldon Johnson criticizing immature dogmas. Even the latter showed spiritual leanings, though, through his poetry and hymns.
“As is often the case with artists and intellectuals who appear to be (or even claim to be) atheists, many in reality are not,” Jon Michael Spencer wrote of him. “Family friend Wilber Thirkield denied any suggestion that Johnson was Godless. He said to Johnson, ‘Would not music also have died in you if you had not kept your heart and mind attuned to noble strains of music?’ — by which he meant the noble strains of divine music.”
While China has been dubbed the least religious country in the world, these Beijing swing dancers, no doubt, dance in tune with the same divine music and in its original spirit of rebellion — that is, to free their souls.
Among the Beijing enclave was a Taiwanese dancer, who only wanted to be identified as Jeff. He relocated to Beijing for software engineering work from 2021 to 2023. At first glance, Jeff might come off as stiff. He’s tall, thin, bespectacled and was direct and businesslike throughout our interview. Even at events, his dress wasn’t particularly ostentatious. On the dance floor, though, he was as free-spirited as anyone.
He had to be; his soul depended on it.
“People work long hours in China,” he said. “Working ‘the 9-to-9’ is common. Sometimes I’d work until one in the morning.”
Work was his main source of stress and detention. COVID restrictions came close, though. Asked if he’d ever feared getting in trouble for dancing at an illegal gathering, he said: “The only thing I was ever afraid of was being locked up at home [in quarantine] for a whole week.”
Even disregarding COVID, fun wasn’t in the air in Beijing.
“With Beijing being the political capital, Xi Jinping has been trying to create a more serious atmosphere,” he added. “One particularly stark example is that there was this entire street lined with bars the last time I went to Sanlitun, whereas now they’ve all been shut down.” Still, the Beijing swing dancers made do with what they had.
A lively couples dance paired with jazz, swing is an outburst of energy and spontaneity — enough to electrify any bar or ballroom.
“[Swing] dancers created new steps as the music inspired them, much as jazz musicians improvise,” the Kennedy Center wrote.
Rogers likewise wrote that jazz was “the revolt of emotions against repression.” Rogers saw this influence not only in the music scene but also in Harlem’s religious communities.
“Under the influence of the ‘spirit’ the sisters would come forward and strut,” he wrote. “Much of jazz enters where it would be least expected.”
COVID-era Beijing was the last place one would expect to find the next Harlem Renaissance — and yet jazz had entered its sterile arteries. Jeff got a taste of this when attending his first dance at a cigar bar in the Chaoyang district.
“Being overseas was stressful, so I needed something I’d already been doing in Taiwan to anchor me. Swing dancing just happened to be one of my hobbies,” Jeff said.
I asked if he’d had a cigar.
“Nah, I couldn’t afford it,” he replied. “I was there to dance. I wasn’t interested in the cigars.”
Jeff took an elevator down to the basement, where the dance floor was.
“It was relatively hidden away,” he said.
He’d previously called it a speakeasy. There, 20 or so other dancers were already letting loose. This was a legal gathering.
“Whether it’s legal or not depends mostly on the max number of people who show up. I’d say 50, give or take, is fine. If you clearly have way more, though — like 80 to 100 — public security might show up,” he added.
This particular dance, which was held regularly on Saturdays, had been organized by a pair of dance partners whom Taiwanese friends had introduced to Jeff. They were the model for what he called the “Chinese brand of hippie” swing dancer.
“You could see the frost on their faces, though,” he said. “They had a lot of stress in their lives. They were dressed like hippies, but they had to make a living, too. I would generally describe them as just really open-minded, though,” Jeff said.
The same went for the scene as a whole.
“I got to meet the most open-minded group of people in Beijing because of this [hobby],” he said incredulously. “It was an automatic filter for the kind of people I wanted to be around. And I realized the swing scene is pretty much the same everywhere in the world. We all love Frankie Manning [swing dance]. And everyone loves this community of foreign [culture], and the spirit of Black dance that it comes from.”
This appreciation was often accompanied by rebellious fashion choices.
“In Taiwan, the swing community was started by street dancers,” Jeff said. “In Beijing, though, most people don’t come from that background. They like the culture associated with swing, so people tend to dress up. The guys wear suits and the [women] wear cheongsam, or those swing dancing skirts.”
Then there are the Chinese hippies. “They have long hair, earrings, [and tattoos]. The women tend to have more aggressive makeup. They just don’t look like your typical office workers.”
This blend of Chinese and American fashion mirrors the blend of African and European fashion worn during the Harlem Renaissance.
“African Americans sought to express their identity and challenge mainstream fashion trends,” according to Fashion-Era.com. “Men wore tailored suits… Women wore shorter hemlines and bolder colors.” In both cases, fashion itself was an act of revolt.
Despite being an outsider, Jeff said he found it relatively easy to make friends in the Beijing scene. Frankie Manning famously said that it didn’t matter “whether you were black, green, yellow, or what. If you walked into the Savoy [Ballroom], the only thing we wanted to know is, can you dance?”
Apparently, Beijing maintained the same policy.
“It wasn’t about how they reacted to me because I was Taiwanese,” Jeff recalled. “The thing is, swing got its start much later in China, so Taiwanese dancers tend to be more experienced. I’d already been dancing for 4–5 years by then, so the vast majority of leaders [other male dancers] were at a lower level than me.”
Still, Jeff didn’t strut.
“It’s all about the atmosphere you create. That’s what’s most important.” You can’t throw out moves when the other person can’t keep up, for example. “A good leader doesn’t let that happen. You need to create an atmosphere where there’s a give-and-take,” he said.
While things were light in the speakeasies, the atmosphere over Beijing was heavy under the cloud of increasingly repressive COVID restrictions.
“It wasn’t that strict at first. But around mid-2021, we started needing these scannable health codes. And you had to do a PCR test to get them — we had to do them every day. You needed these health codes to get in [to dances] — and basically to go to any public place, whether it be on the subway or wherever. But then, if you happened to pass someone infected while out, your code would turn red, and the next day you couldn’t go anywhere.”
This didn’t stop Jeff and the others from taking risks, though. It was again in a bar in the Chaoyang district that Jeff experienced his first crackdown.
“We danced until about 10 o’clock, then the whole thing got closed down,” he said. The venue had applied in advance with the authorities to hold the event. “The thing about applying, though, is, strictly speaking, you’re not supposed to have more than 50 people, no matter what. Everyone was rushing to get a cab home. If public security designated the area an infected zone, everyone’s health code would have been canceled.”
By the end of 2023, however, as COVID waned, countries reopened their borders. As Jeff prepared to return to Taiwan, he found himself dancing less and less.
“Eventually I just stopped going, because I wasn’t stressed anymore,” he laughed. “After I left my job, the stress was gone!”
Eric R. Stone is an American journalist and translator of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist classics. He’s translated four books: Happiness & Suffering, The Tao Te Ching: Wondrous Revelations, Emptiness Energy, and The Secret of Chan. His writing has appeared in Lacuna Magazine, The News Lens, Taiwan News, and The ATA Chronicle. Eric currently lives in Taipei. In his free time, he runs a Mandarin-Taiwanese D&D campaign. See more of his writing at ericrstone.substack.com, or learn more at ericrstone.com