Rapper PG One's songs taken offline

All of a popular rapper's songs have been removed from such music-streaming platforms as QQ Music and Xiami.

Official social-media platforms have criticized one of PG One's songs, titled Christmas Eve, for promoting drug use and insulting women. He released the song in 2015.

Its lyrics talk about "sleeping during the day and shouting at night; pure white powder is walking on the floor" and include degrading sexual references.

The 23-year-old rapper, whose real name is Wang Hao, was born in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. He joined the Xi'an-based hip-hop group, Hong Hua Hui, or Triple H, in 2015, and rose to fame after winning on the Rap of China, a popular online reality show produced by video-streaming website iQiyi.

The 12-episode show ran from June to September 2017 and has received more than 2.7 billion views. It placed the previously underground genre in the spotlight.

Xinhua News Agency posted on its Sina Weibo microblog account on Jan 5, stating that any singer who "doesn't respect the industry and audience doesn't deserve to perform on the hip-hop stage".

China Women's News, which is published by the All-China Women's Association, also posted an opinion piece on its Weibo account on Jan 4, accusing the rapper of "promoting drug use among young people and insulting women".

PG One apologized on his Sina Weibo account, which has about 4.8 million followers, on the same day. He says he has removed all the songs with offensive lyrics and that "the spirit of hip-hop music should always be love and peace".

"Many young people are hip-hop fans. I can't imagine how these songs will influence them," one netizen wrote on Weibo.

The Ministry of Culture released a blacklist of 120 songs that "trumpet obscenity, violence and crime, or harm social morality" and ordered website administrators to remove them from their sites in 2015.