The Weeknd Sampled Faye Wong's 1993 Classic in a Song Called 'Hong Kong', and China Is Listening Again
When The Weeknd debuted a new song called 'Hong Kong' at his show in the city, built on a sample of Faye Wong's 1993 Cantopop track 'Season Wind', the 33-year-old song shot back up Chinese charts — and became the latest proof that Chinese pop's afterlife now runs through Western sampling.
At The Weeknd's Hong Kong concert stop this week, the Canadian superstar debuted a new song — and the first few seconds of it stopped the show.
The track, called "Hong Kong," is built on a sample of "Ji Hou Feng" — "Season Wind" — a 1993 song by Faye Wong, recorded when she was still known in Cantonese pop as Faye Wong of the "empty-voice" school, four years before her Mandarin breakthrough and a decade before she became the Chinese-language pop's most internationally recognised voice. The Weeknd's version folds the original's dreamy, urban melancholy into his own dark R&B style, and the crowd reaction at the debut — phone torches up, the sample recognisable within seconds — was itself the story.
Chinese social media's response has been a mix of shock, pride and close listening. On Weibo, clips of the moment collected tens of thousands of likes; music critic Ai Di offered the fullest read, locating the sample in a specific urban mood: "city night-colour nostalgia," he called it, the neon-tinted sadness of a Hong Kong that existed in 1993. The Baidu hot-search board — where "1993's Season Wind Blows to the World" charted at No. 49 — framed it the same way: a moment when a Chinese song, already 33 years old, was being handed a second life abroad rather than at home.
What makes this more than a celebrity crossover is what the sampling says about how Chinese pop travels now. For decades, the story of Chinese pop abroad was wordless: a Cantonese melody hummed in a Chinatown, a Jay Chou album bought by a diaspora teenager. Sampling inverts the flow — a Western superstar's new single puts a Mandarin-Cantonese vocal into a global pipeline that reaches listeners who have never heard of Faye Wong, and some of them will look her up. It is not a Hit parade moment; it is a permission structure.
It is also not the first. The Weeknd's Hong Kong stop follows a run of high-profile Western borrowings from Chinese pop's back catalogue — samples, covers, and occasional unlicensed lifts that have become common enough that Chinese listeners now keep score. The track arrives as The Weeknd is in the middle of his Asia tour; the song's name and its sample are both pointed at the city he is playing.
There is a wrinkle worth watching: licensing. The sample's clearance has not been addressed in any statement this moment produced — if it was cleared through the rights holders, fine; if not, the same pipeline that gave a 1993 song its second life will run into the question of who owns that life.
Either way, the moment says something plain about where Chinese pop stands. A song can be 33 years old, half-forgotten at home, and still find a new audience — as long as someone with a bigger microphone thinks it is worth carrying.