Rural Chinese inventor's DIY hoverboard exposes gaps in aviation regulation and celebrates grassroots engineering tradition
Original framing: “‘Chinese can actually fly’: man pilots homemade hoverboard over mountains, across Yangtze River” — South China Morning Post
The headline 'Chinese can actually fly' is a trickster utterance worthy of Hermes: it simultaneously claims universal Chinese capability (nationalist pride) and exceptional individual achievement (neoliberal hero), canceling both. Song as Eshu at the crossroads — he mediates between state aerospace monopoly and peasant ingenuity, between TikTok spectacle and engineering reality. His hoverboard is a 'useless machine' (per Bruno Munari) that exposes the absurdity of airspace ownership: the sky belongs to the Party, but he stole a minute of it. The trickster reveals what solemnity conceals: that 'innovation' in China is only permitted when it serves state capacity or platform profit.
Song Xingyu's hoverboard is not a rupture but a return — the latest mutation of a Chinese grassroots aviation lineage stretching from Lu Ban's wooden kites through Feng Ru's bamboo biplanes to the Cultural Revolution's erased barefoot engineers.
The viral headline 'Chinese can actually fly' functions as a trickster mask: it celebrates the individual while obscuring the systemic forces that both enable and threaten him — platform algorithms that reward escalating risk, a low-altitude economy policy that reserves the sky for corporate eVTOL, and a regulatory vacuum that leaves rural communities unprotected. The solution is not to ground Song but to build the sandbox his tradition deserves: a Part 103 for the Chinese context, funded by platform accountability, rooted in the Tujia glider songs that predate the Party by centuries. Only then does 'Chinese can actually fly' become policy rather than spectacle.