Modiba Is Now A breakout Hit In China. Here’s Why

Motswedi Modiba

Singer Motswedi Modiba features in the latest season of “Sing! China.” She made it through the audition stage and will be filming the next round in the coming weeks.

Motswedi Modiba is a South African singer who was giving indications of a promising career in her country of origin. Now, she’s a breakout hit on one of China’s biggest unscripted television shows subsequent to dazzling millions with her performance in Mandarin.

Modiba, who is reported to be the first Black and African contestant on “Sing! China,” intrigued the judges with her cover of the ballad “Love” by Karen Mok.

The competition, in its eighth season, follows a comparable format to “The Voice” in the US, with the first round passed judgment on blind. Two of the four judges chose Modiba to advance to the next round, compelling the singer to pick one as a mentor for the last option stage of the competition (she picked singer, rapper and actor Wilber Pan.)

The singer has dominated Chinese social media, with millions of people including bloggers showering praises on her. They can’t hide their euphoria with regards to how she could sing so well.

South African singer Motswedi Modiba, who goes by the stage name MOE, was born in Tshwane, South Africa. The 26-year-old’s parents sent her to Pretoria Chinese School, where she learned Mandarin from age six to 18.

They looked at world trends and saw China was probably going to become an important world player economically, so wanted to give them the best opportunities in life, she explained.

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In high school, Modiba entered an international language contest called the ‘Chinese Bridge Competition’, winning the national category. She earned a scholarship to study Chinese language and literature at Yunnan Normal University in Kunming, China.

As a child she had performed on the recording of song “Baba Wethu” by South African gospel artist Tebs David, and at university in China she entered small-scale singing competitions, singing in Mandarin. In 2022 she launched a career in South Africa as MOE. with single “It Was A Vibe,” winning a Metro FM Music Award.

Until recently, she was studying for a master’s degree in jazz arts at the Manhattan School of Music, New York. One night last April, she joked with friends about trying to make a viral hit on Douyin (the name for TikTok in mainland China), and posted a video of her singing.

“It does go viral,” she recalled. “Then I post another one and it goes viral … within about two weeks, I had over a million views.”

Emails began landing in her inbox, including one from a producer of “Sing! China.” By June she was in China preparing to audition.

“It wasn’t calculated at first,” she said. “But when I started posting … that kind of made me feel maybe there might be something here – there might be a space for me in China to try something.”

Other African artists have made inroads into Mandopop (Mandarin pop music), like Modibe’s compatriot Eli Zaleo. Modibe insists she’s not following in their footsteps, pointing to the range of genres, including RnB, ballads and jazz, that she flits between.

But she’s not content to limit herself to a Chinese audience. “I want to become a household name around the world,” she said. “Right now I’m in China, and I’m doing ‘Sing! China,’ but I am also trying to cultivate audiences back home in South Africa, in Africa, in the US.”

Modibe described her “Sing! China” audition, broadcast on August 11, as life coming “full circle,” after performing the song years before at a student competition. With a much larger audience this time, “nerves completely took over me,” she said. “There was so much adrenaline that I can’t really remember how I felt during the performance.”

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The singer said she has a few weeks before filming commences of the “battle” rounds, where performers compete against each other head-to-head. Preparations are underway, she said, including costume and hair and makeup, and a song choice that she’s not at liberty to discuss.

“I really do feel honored,” Modibe said of her boundary-breaking run in the show, “getting into spaces that generally people from outside (of China) wouldn’t think of getting into.”

She now commands more than 250,000 followers on Douyin, where the reaction to her audition has been overwhelmingly positive. It stands in stark contrast to anti-Black racism on Chinese social media platforms, which a recent Human Rights Watch report described as having “become common in recent years, often created by netizens for the purpose of attracting traffic and generating profit.”

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Modiba said she had heard that some on social media have debated whether she is actually South African or Black (“I’m definitely completely South African Black,” she said).

“Yes, I’m in China singing in Mandarin, and I’m speaking in Mandarin, but that doesn’t mean that I am not proud of who I am,” said Modibe.

“I’m not trying to get away from my African-ness. I celebrate and I love that I’m a South African,” she added, teasing she’s working to include parts of her heritage into upcoming performances, whether that’s in costume or a verse or two in Sotho, another language in which she’s fluent.

credit: CNN

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