Yinfi on How China’s Velvet Prison Goes Global

Seeds of Fire

全球畫地為牢

Yinfi is the artistic persona of Yin Lu, a UK-based screen composer, speaker and performing artist who described himself as ‘a Chinese citizen embracing individual liberties’. His performances feature songs whose ‘lyrics preserving memories erased by the Chinese authorities’. In a biographical note on Substack, Yinfi tells us that:

My musical journey began at the age of ten, when I first touched a piano. Growing up in a traditional family in a remote town in Guizhou, China, I initially followed the expected path: studying diligently for the Gaokao and graduating with a bachelor’s degree in literature from Nanjing University in 2013. However, my true passion—composition—called to me, prompting me to relocate to Shanghai to pursue a long-held dream. Through rigorous training and assisting renowned composers such as Yu-peng Chen, I gradually established myself as a composer who has worked on blockbuster feature films, TV series, video games, and song productions for A-list Chinese pop stars.

Subsequently, Yinfi moved to the UK to study at the Royal College of Music. In doing so he was ‘motivated by a desire to learn more about the music industry beyond the Great Firewall of the PRC.’ He graduated with a master’s degree in Composition for Screen from Enrica Sciandrone and Howard Davidson’s classes in 2021. As a screen composer, Yinfi’s work has earned international recognition, including the European Talent Award, BAFTA Connect membership, and Arts Council England’s Global Talent endorsement.

Yinfi has now expanded his repertoire to include YouTube essays about the ideological and cultural limitations of the Xi Jinping era and China’s expanding global influence. The first of these essays, titled The Strange Logic of China’s Online Policing System, was soon followed by How China Built Tech Power Without Critical Thinking, and then by China’s Unfreedom Mirrors the West?, in which Yinfi features the work of the political scientist Liu Yu 劉瑜 and Chen Qiushi 陳秋實, a lawyer and becalmed citizen journalist. (For more on Liu Yu, see ‘Silence, silence!’; and, on Chen, see How Steel is Tempered — Chen Qiushi Returns.)

Below, we introduced Yinfi’s video essays as part of our celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience. They are relevant in particular as Yinfi’s insights chime with our work on the Chinese Velvet Prison, a topic that we featured in the second edition of Seeds of Fire, published in New York in 1988. Many of Yinfi’s insights also resonate with the themes of Seeds in the 1980s and with those featured in China Heritage since 2016.

The Chinese rubric of this chapter in Seeds of Fire — 全球畫地為牢 quánqiú huà dì wéi láo — is a reference to the essay I published in The Nineties Monthly in 1987 in which I introduced Chinese readers to Miklós Haraszti’s The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism (see 社會主義的“軟禁文化”：讀哈拉茨蒂的《畫地為牢》，《九十年代月刊》1987年10月，第96-97頁).

Four decades on, Harazsti’s The Velvet Prison remains essential reading for those interested in the past, present and future of China under the Communist Party.

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This material is published as part of Kumbaya China: I’ve Seen the Future, a multipart chapter in Seeds of Fire: China Heritage Annual 2026. It consists of the following sections:

China’s Velvet Prison, one painstakingly constructed over half a century since Mao Zedong’s demise in September 1976, is one that reflects an abiding strategy of the Communist Party since the days of the Yan’an Rectification Movement launched in 1942. Then, when all Party members at the wartime guerrilla base were required to align their thinking with a new form of Sinified Marxism that would be known as ‘Mao Zedong Thought’. At the time, an old Buddhist term was employed to describe what was required: Everyone had to demonstrate their unquestioning submission to the Party line ‘verbally, in writing, as well as in the heart’ — 口服、手服、心服.

In the Velvet Prison of today, verbal submission 口服 remains paramount, even for non-Party members. As China’s Velvet Prison increasingly goes global, all of those who engage with China are expected to adhere to Beijing’s way of framing reality.

As we have observed in our series Contra Trump, given the haunting parallels between Trump’s USA and Xi Jinping’s Chinese Republic, we believe that it is time for a new academic and journalistic analytical approach to the Sino-American conundrum. We’ll call it ‘Whataboutism Studies’, a somewhat different form of ‘Both-Sidesism’, and it explores how the Horseshoe Theory might offer a useful perspective on the bilateral apache dance. The theory suggests that the right — in this case ‘American Fascism’ — and left — China’s semi-feudal semi-capitalist state socialism bend toward each other like the ends of a horseshoe. Even though false equivalencies abound in US-China discussions, real equivalents deserve attention, in particular in the post-COVID era when political and economic pilgrims seek influence as New China Experts.

I have also observed that,

One can’t but savour the circularity, and ironies, of history — inspired by “the American story” in 2007, Ambassador Fu Ying hired foreign PR firms to promote “the China Story” in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In 2012, Xi Jinping formally adopted the approach and now, 14 years later, Trump’s US regime is in turn promoting its version of “the American story” globally:

‘The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.

‘The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Monday and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation. It lays out a sweeping set of instructions for how embassy staff should push back against what it describes as coordinated foreign efforts to undermine American interests abroad. …

‘The cable instructs … embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.’

— Joseph Gedeon, US directs embassies to team up against foreign ‘hostility’ – and use X to ‘counter anti-American propaganda’, The Guardian, 30 March 2026

As the two states, China and America, contend on a global scale one should remain mindful of the fact that their velvet prison strategy is backed up by a carceral reality of bricks, mortar and barbed wire.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
5 April 2026

Easter Sunday

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Yinfi Online:

Yinfi performances:

See also:

The Velvet Prison in China Heritage:

Also:

And, Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium:

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The Chinese Velvet Prison

After decades of rule by Proledic, external political coercion and the internal pressures of the Chinese deep structure meld to create a new self-censoring cultural figure, the state artist. The degradation of the individual, in particular the intellectual, in such a situation is often thought of by the Chinese as unique to their cultural tradition. In fact, the artist under Proledic is common to all socialist systems. The Hungarian dissident-poet Miklós Haraszti describes the phenomenon in his samizdat classic The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism.

As Mainland China enters the phase of “soft” technocratic socialism, the parameters of the cultural Velvet Prison are being measured out in everyday practice. But this does not mean that there is no resistance to a new higher level of co-option, conformity within the deep structure of the State. Individual artists struggle to maintain or achieve their independence. Each campaign against Bourgelib disaffects sections of the intelligentsia and increases the number of marginalized intellectuals and writers seeking to develop their own self-referential system of values and artistic norms. But they are faced with a choice of suffering complete cultural ostracism or accepting the State’s efforts to incorporate them in a new social contract, one in which consensus replaces coercion, and complicity subverts criticism.

It is in the borderlands of permissibility that contact between alienated or marginal writers and the State takes place. They barter endlessly, using different rates of exchange—freedom to publish, or the right to remain unmolested, permission to enjoy the privileges of the cultural élite or even to travel overseas. Deals are cut, or fall through as the case may be. The sensitive pressure points of the individual are laid bare, in the antechambers of the Velvet Prison.

— Geremie R. Barmé, 1987, quoted in What’s in a Word? — Geremie R. Barmé discusses New Sinology

Three YouTube Essays by Yinfi

The Strange Logic of China’s Online Policing System

In this video essay, I dissect the architecture of China’s online policing to answer a simple question: why are some critics tolerated while others are erased? Relying on 30 years of lived experience navigating this system in China, I move beyond the “free speech versus censorship” binary to explain how modern autocracy actually functions.

Chapters:

0:00 – The Contradiction
2:56 – The Architecture
8:15 – Tech Builders vs. Humanities Critics
13:48 – Grey-Zone Navigators vs. Grounded Witnesses
20:15 – Hong Kong & The Ultimate Proof

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How China Built Tech Power Without Critical Thinking

This is a personal reflection on growing up and establishing a career in China, and how that experience shaped how I think. Based on my own journey through school, university, and the tech industry, I explore a paradox: how a system that limits certain kinds of questioning can still produce innovation at scale. It’s not just about China – it’s a philosophical look at what critical thinking really means, and what happens when it becomes optimised for answers rather than questions.

Chapters:

00:00 China’s matrix
02:39 EDUCATION → “Optimisation Over Inquiry”
06:08 LANGUAGE → “Cognitive Efficiency Engine”
08:16 HYPER-HEDONISM → “Motivation Replacement”
11:49 SCALE AND GLOBAL BLIND SPOTS

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China’s Unfreedom Mirrors the West?

We assume the lines are clearly drawn: the West is free, and China is not. But having lived in both, the reality of “unfreedom” is far more complex. A video essay on the paradox of modern liberty, the illusion of “free from”, and the invisible traps mirroring each other across the globe. My puzzle dovetails with yours.

Chapters:

00:00 – The Invisible Unfreedom
00:55 – Two Layers of Freedom
03:36 – Mirrored Radicalisation
07:10 – Mirrored Conscience
10:20 – Our Last Hope

References:

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圉 yǔ, ‘imprison’, ‘oversee’, ‘lose one’s freedom’, in the hand of Mao Zedong