The success of the reality show The Rap of China relies on a certain balance between the“real”and the“show”. The key to achieving this balance is hip-hop’s claim to“keep it real”, which catered to the public’s appeal for“personality”. Hip-hop culture has a long tradition of political resistance, and the“noise”it creates can also be regarded as a subculture’s resistance to mainstream culture. However, The Rap of China carried out a subtle depoliticization of hip-hop, making the show without resistance, and everything was presented as entertain-ment. Firstly, it passed a rigorous political review of the participants and performance; secondly, it especially emphasized the“technical”dimension of Rap and weakened its“expressive”dimension. After excluding the dimension of resistance, the rappers from The Rap of China even fnd it hard to resist the“pan-moralism”in online public opinion. This kind of compromise is the only way for China’s hip-hop to move from“underground”to“mainstream”. However, it is unfair to criticize it only from a dualism of politics-capital, enter-tainment-personality. There is no fundamental conflict between the materialism of hip-hop and its commercialization. Commercialization is also the important pusher for the politicization of hip-hop, and hip-hop itself has revolutionized the entertainment industry. Hip-hop itself contains plenty of paradoxes, so we need to jump out of the framework of dualism to analyze it. For today’s China, the greatest signifcance of hip-hop shows is to provide young people in an age of lack of experience with the means and enthusiasm to express their experience, which is itself a kind of cultural politics.