When one opens the window, it is natural that some flies will come inside. (Deng Xiao-ping)

Flies are not lovely creatures. Their connotations in our language are negative: multiple-eyed, dirty, sickness-spreading, full of pus…and we are expecting a more hygienic, more civilized, more elegant, more orderly time of money-making. The flies and us are enemies! In major cities of China, punk, I am afraid, only enjoys a very limited audience, because we are all the time concerned about hygiene, neat clothes, civilization, politeness. But it is also because of this that flies bear a special meaning in our life.

– He Li, PRC rock music critic, in promotional material for the band The Fly[1]

Deng Xiao-ping’s post-Cultural Revolution reforms were intended primarily to take China into a “new era” by liberalizing the state-run economic sector. These economic initiatives encouraged a higher degree of interaction with overseas investors from capitalist countries in Asia and the West and the development of an increasingly privatized market economy “with Chinese characteristics.” As Richard Kraus has pointed out, reform of institutions and policies regulating the arts and culture in China “were included almost as an afterthought”.[2] But the sweeping economic measures of the 1980s very much included cultural institutions, which for the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic faced a requirement to pay attention to the bottom line in their accounts ledgers. In the state-monopoly film, broadcasting, and music industries, this meant that producers of official culture for the first time were encouraged (or pressured) to pay attention to audience tastes and desires. This had a dramatic effect on the kinds of movies, TV programs, and popular music that were approved for production (very much including works that emphasized “entertainment” value over education and indoctrination), and these reforms also opened the door for an influx of imported culture and ideas about culture that was without precedent since the founding of the People’s Republic.

By the mid-1980s, many Chinese intellectuals and artists were locked in spirited debate over the optimal direction that cultural activities should take in this rapidly evolving context. What came to be labeled the “Cultural Fever” of the 1980s was in part an attempt by intellectuals to assert-in an often elitist and paternalistic way-a claim to an increased measure of power and legitimacy in social and cultural decision-making. Zhang Xudong has described this phenomenon as:

the contemporary extension, and no doubt a deepening and intensification, of the century-long debate over Chinese modernity. As in the earlier decades, the basic arguments…were distributed across a tension-charged spectrum between, at the one end, a radical repositioning of the cultural self in a modernity embodied by the West and, at the other, an impulse to reassert the traditional values undisturbed by the traces of the other that have accompanied the history of modern China…. [3]

One significant, though not necessarily direct, manifestation of Cultural Fever was the development of a nascent but steadily more visible youth subculture in China during the 1980s. These subcultural rumblings increasingly gravitated in the direction of indigenous and imported artistic and popular cultural expression that emphasized previously taboo tendencies such as individualism, personal identity, and other alternative perspectives on social values. The debates over these ideas and issues were manifested, among other places, in the rise of China’s first “underground” rock music scene, which became a key focus within broader discussions over the meaning and significance of liumang (hooligan) culture in contemporary China (which will be discussed in more detail below).

This liminal terrain was on display in a handful of movies-produced during the years surrounding the Tiananmen massacre-that chronicled aspects of PRC youth subcultures. [4] In this essay, I will discuss Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Rock Kids (China 1988) and Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards (China 1993). The former was produced in the thrall of Cultural Fever’s more optimistic articulations of the late 80s; the latter appeared after the official end (in 1992) of the post-June 4 crackdown on dissident cultural expression, a time when the creators of alternatives to mainstream film and popular music practice were in the process of exploring their options for production and distribution in a rapidly evolving and inevitably politicized situation.

Popular music, youth, and subcultural expression

The institutionalization of popular music and youth subcultures in the West is by now a recognized and familiar phenomenon. The decline and fall of rock and rap music’s alleged outlaw status (which was, of course, frequently exaggerated or oversimplified in many accounts) is often lamented by popular music critics and fans of a certain age, as is the efficiency with which transnational music marketers have channeled the libidinal energy, imagination, and anger of musicians and audiences into a safely contained, perpetual cycle of consumerist behavior. That is, these days most forms of popular music don’t seem to present the same element of danger they once did to institutions of social authority and order. There are, of course, recurrent blips of genuine cultural contestation when something “new” (e.g., punk, rap, house) comes along, but as social/musical movements these innovations are inevitably ephemeral, thanks to their radically solipsistic and decentralized nature, and to the constant, commercially driven demand within popular culture for something still “newer”. Still, even now musical manifestations of popular culture have the power to shock naïve and hypersensitive listeners/viewers (this subcategory can be conveniently approximated as anyone outside the dominant target demographic). [5]

In the PRC, though, popular music and youth subcultures continue to operate on contested cultural turf in ways and to a degree largely unheard of today in the West. The most apparent reasons for this situation, of course, are the legacy of post-1949 political and social reforms that held that the “voice of the people” was henceforth synonymous with that of the state. [6] That is, popular culture in the Western sense, or as manifested in 20th Century China before the founding of the PRC, ceased to operate as a meaningful term. The renewed self-segregation of China following the Communists’ ascension to power came more than a century after the country had been forced to open by Western invaders and was a reaction to decades of exploitation by capitalist democracies (this, as Hao Huang points out, was China’s original “open door”[7] ). It is difficult to understate the effects of this trauma; as Mayfair Mei-hui Yang observes:

There is historical significance to the fact that China’s opening to the world was forced and its entrance into the world of nations was not on equal terms. China’s encounter with global forces was disastrous for cultural self-esteem, and out of this was born nationalism. [8]

The People’s Republic was a national experiment founded on principles of collective social and economic organization, with policies set by a top-down political hierarchy. With regard to forms of cultural expression (including the media), argues Yang:

[t]he audience was constructed as an undifferentiated whole of “the masses” or “the people,” so that gone were the variety and diversity of styles and tastes in the arts…. In Maoist China, the mass media helped create a homogeneity of culture that played down regional identities, promoted the voice of the central government in Beijing in Mandarin, and reiterated the same state messages in all media…. [9]

But this state of affairs began to thaw with the introduction of the Deng-directed market reforms; by the mid-1980s, official restrictions on the importing of some kinds of foreign and emphatically bourgeois cultural goods were beginning to be relaxed. This trend significantly included inroads made in China by capitalist musical entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and to a lesser extent the West. These businesspeople have succeeded since the mid-1980s in mining a mainland youth market which for the first time has leisure time and disposable income, especially in the urban areas of the eastern and southern parts of the country where per capita incomes have risen well above the national average. It’s the capitalist dream scenario of pent-up demand in an underserved market, and China by the 1990s was awash with the soft and presumably unthreatening melodies of Cantopop and the Taiwanese equivalent, and to a degree a range of popular music forms from the U.S. and the U.K. [10]

This situation is directly connected with what Donald Nonini and Aihwa Ong have called the “transnationalization” of Chinese culture. [11]  Fostered by the increased migration across national borders of people, images, and ideas made possible by a combination of technological, economic, and political factors, there is today an accretion of “authentic” Chinese identities, both outside of and within the PRC As Nonini and Ong put it:

The proliferation of different ways of being Chinese-through accumulation strategies, mobility, and modern mass media-has engendered complex, shifting, and fragmented subjectivities that are at once specific yet global…. Thus there are multiple subjective senses of Chineseness that appear to be based not on the possession of some reified Chinese culture but on a propensity to seek opportunities elsewhere, a spatial projection of economic and social desires across geopolitical divides. [12]

This “spatial projection” does not necessarily involve physical migration; rather, it can be manifested also through the transborder movement and appropriation of cultural artifacts and ideas. That is, as the pace of cultural exchange increases, official definitions of the nature of Chineseness within the PRC are compelled to compete with alternative definitions, some of which have origins well outside Chinese history and culture and are far more introspective and personalized than is normally compatible with the sanctioned rhetoric of state policies. These imported versions of the self are in turn transformed within the PRC and reconfigured on more identifiably “local” terms, but those terms and reconfigurations may nonetheless operate beyond the pale of official orthodoxies. One of the key areas in which this “struggle for meaning” has been most evident is popular music, especially in relation to the ways in which such musical expression articulates ideologies of identity. As Andrew Jones has observed, “Chinese Marxism and the Confucian tradition share a common interest in ‘reconciling the spontaneous expression of feeling [in music] and its normative regulation, in harnessing more dangerous pleasures to the service of the social order.” [13]

In his 1992 book, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, Jones enumerated the key institutional and counter-institutional participants in the industry’s ongoing economic and cultural debate, each with its own slate of at times overlapping and at times mutually exclusive vested interests. As Jones says:

Chinese popular music is less a mere adjunct to leisure than a battlefield on which ideological struggle is waged. The CCP has consistently endeavored to engineer the pleasures of popular music to the end of retaining power, bolstering their own ideological legitimacy, and making money. [14]

The version of popular music which has achieved official approval is cumulatively known as tongsu, a broad descriptive category which includes a range of styles, some derived from indigenous forms of folk music, some directly influenced by imported modes, including Cantopop and Western disco (and its dance floor descendants). The common factor in all styles of tongsu is that song lyrics are at least intended to express government-authorized perspectives on relevant issues and policies, although there are numerous examples of tongsu songwriters generating lyrics with more ambiguous connotations. [15]  It is in any case true that tongsu is the conventional route through which one actually can hope to earn a living writing, playing, or singing popular music in China: the institutional apparatuses of radio and television airplay, and domestic financial investments in recording, distribution, and live performance are geared almost exclusively to the tongsu industry.

Very much on the other hand, musicians who insist on playing Western-inflected versions of band-oriented rock music must be willing to “jump into the ocean” as independent entrepreneurs. They must be prepared to be largely shut out of domestic opportunities for broadcast exposure and recording contracts, and until recent years live performances by all but the biggest names were difficult to arrange beyond the occasional ill- or unpaid café or basement gig for an audience of no more than a few dozen like-minded souls. And even established performers such as Cui Jian have periodically found their careers threatened by shifting and usually opaque policy decisions. [16]

This contentious and contradictory environment for rock has developed significantly because the music created by China’s rock ‘n’ rollers is considered in official circles to be morally and ideologically suspect at best, and counter-revolutionary at worst. At the same time, the State has less interest today in systematically vetting most forms of cultural expression, and it also has become less and less feasible for it to do so. In any case, I would reemphasize here the paradox that it was the Party itself that created the conditions under which a rock subculture could develop in China. Prior to the reform era, state control of all forms of cultural expression was far more monolithic, although, as Richard Kraus has pointed out, the PRC’s state censorship mechanism was always different from those of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, most significantly in the degree to which the Chinese censorship apparatus was (and is) decentralized. As Kraus argues:

Such a system worked well to suppress heterodox ideas when officials throughout the nation believed in (or at least followed) a common cause. But the very informality of China’s censorship has made it easier for cultural officials simply to let up their vigilance in a task in which many never found much pleasure. [17]

Also, the post-1978 explosion of creative activity in every media form and new developments in communication technology made such control much more difficult as well (in popular music, the widespread introduction of the audio cassette into China early in the reform era was especially crucial). [18]

Western-style rock music found its first Chinese audiences in Beijing, largely because of the comparatively large foreign community and the presence of several large universities in the national capital. The most profound early influences on Chinese rock musicians and fans were U.S. and British hard rock and art rock bands of the 70s and 80s (e.g., Queensryche, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, and Rush), primarily because young Chinese were getting access to “tapes belonging to predominantly white and middle class American students and overseas visitors.” [19] Musical tastes and performance styles became much more diverse in the 1990s, but it continues to be true in China today that rock and its associated forms continue to be primarily a subcultural expression. This is because the government, the government-controlled mainstream popular music industry, and audiences alike continue to favor softer Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop styles (collectively known in the PRC as gangtai) and the mainland equivalents released by tongsu performers. Alternatives to the officially sanctioned forms of popular music are at various times tolerated, harassed, co-opted, or banned depending on the direction of much larger political winds. The formal components of rock music sometimes offends the Party because of its obvious Western derivation-and also, I think, because of the generation gap which loud, roughly sung, discordant, blues-based, guitar-driven music often creates everywhere in the world. The content is considered dubious because Chinese rock lyrics tend to either ignore or flatly contradict official edicts concerning main cultural themes. Instead of optimistically celebrating the Party, the nation, and the people, they swirl in an “oppositional ideology of individualism”[20] and often express a high degree of personal alienation, ennui, and directionlessness (that is, in some ways these lyrics have much in common with those of many Western rock songs).

Rock Kids: liumang lite

Rock Kids, set in the disputed landscape of contemporary trends in popular music in China, addresses the relationship between new styles of music and China’s budding youth subcultures. The film, which was released in early 1989, is based on a story written just months earlier by Liu Yiran, who at the time was a writer for the People’s Liberation Army. [21] Liu’s impressionistic, loosely structured story consists of the visceral, sensual, profanity-laced, present-tense musings of a young male Beijinger who is interested, it seems, only in feeling good, a state of being he achieves by making out with his girlfriend and, even more profoundly (from his perspective), by expressing himself through break dancing. As a character, this unnamed protagonist articulates a subculture whose aspirations are transnational rather than national: he references and identifies with Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, the Hollywood break dancing film Breakin’ (USA 1984), and even soccer superstar Diego Maradona, while icons of Chinese national identity and political correctness are scorned or pointedly ignored. He gathers with other break-dancers at the Forbidden City’s Noon Gate, but this symbol of Chinese antiquity and a vanquished feudalism registers for these subculture participants only as a convenient and familiar place to hang, try out new moves, and pursue an utterly personal rhythm-and-volume-induced rapture:

The more I dance, the crazier I get, every cell in my body is rockin’ ‘n’ rollin’. Fuckin’ ecstasy! Not some robotic performance, but total liberty. My life starts now. Clenching my fists, I raise them high in the air, waving my arms. I enter a realm of pure freedom… [22]

Tian’s film version of Liu’s story was produced in the wake of the Party’s mid-1980s mandate that, like other previously state-run entities, the Chinese movie industry was to be weaned from state subsidies and eventually made self-sufficient. Their government handouts reduced, the country’s film studios scrambled to come up with product that audiences would be more willing to pay to see. As a result, there was a good deal more emphasis on the “entertainment value” of projects and a good deal less on their political value. Filmmakers returned increasingly to popular pre-revolutionary comedy and action genres, and they also began to produce mainland equivalents of Hong Kong and Hollywood cop films, melodramas, and musicals (many viewers were already familiar with the imported templates, thanks to the wonders of video piracy). [23]

In this shifting industrial setting, an unconventional project like Rock Kids, which would not have gotten beyond the pitch stage a few years earlier, could actually get made within the Chinese studio system. That it was possible to do so also at least indirectly correlated with the much broader debates of the Cultural Fever of the 1980s.

The issues raised by the notion of a Cultural Fever were debated during the 1980s at the loftiest levels of Chinese intellectual thought, but some were expressed in more populist arenas as well, including most famously in the controversial television series He Shang and the best-selling and much-discussed novels, stories, and television and film scripts written by Wang Shuo. [24] Wang’s work is the most immediately relevant in the present discussion. In telling tales of apolitical and militantly unambitious slackers, shady entrepreneurs, and other disreputable social and political outsiders, he and some other young writers (including Liu Yiran) tapped very successfully into a burgeoning vein of cynicism and boredom among urban adolescents and young adults who had grown up largely in the framework of the reform era. These “children of Deng” were witness to and generally enthusiastic participants in the rise of the PRC’s version of consumer culture, which arrived on the heels of new initiatives encouraging some kinds of private enterprise and individual initiative in the country’s economic sector. It was not lost on the average citizen, though, that this new freedom to acquire wealth and possessions was not accompanied by similar reforms in the political sector. The implicit reaction of Wang’s literary and cinematic protagonists to this apparently paradoxical situation was to disconnect from the political sphere altogether, and to opt instead for an unabashedly self-interested search for immediate gratification in the realm of the material and the ephemeral. This new social type was the sardonic shadow image of the reform era’s more official model of the idealistic entrepreneur who manages to juggle the pursuit of personal wealth with an understanding that such capitalist-roading is a transitional phase within China’s modernization, all of which is leading in the direction of a socialist utopia envisioned by an unquestioned political elite. For the average citizen, the problem with this statist public relations scenario was that s/he saw it being subverted on a daily basis, in the form of widening income gaps and widespread inefficiency and corruption in both the private and the public sectors.

Especially through Wang’s writings, then, an updated version of the liumang or “hooligan” figure became prominent within China’s unofficial culture of the 1980s. This is a term with a long cultural and legal lineage in China (and in other parts of the world) that refers to a social type prone to habitual and usually petty crime. [25]  In the context of the Cultural Fever, though, the role and perspective of the liumang took on interestingly ambivalent connotations. As John Minford observed in 1985:

[T]he liumang generation as I see it is a wider concept. Rapist, whore, black-marketeer, unemployed youth, alienated intellectual, frustrated artist or poet-the spectrum has its dark satanic end, its long middle band of relentless gray, and shining at the other end, a patch of visionary light. It is an embryonic alternative culture. [26]

Rock Kids tries to chronicle and explore some of the music-based aspects of this “embryonic alternative culture.” Tian Zhuangzhuang’s first foray into the brave new world of PRC commercial filmmaking, however, largely fails to capture the scurrilous energy of the story on which it is based. But I would suggest that at least some of the aesthetic and thematic shortcomings of Rock Kids are symptomatic of the difficulties faced by PRC filmmakers aspiring to work within the reform era’s evolved version of official culture (and these difficulties were perhaps especially daunting for a card-carrying member of the Fifth Generation like Tian, whose previous films were among the most uncompromisingly experimental of the PRC’s “new wave” of the 1980s). The revised mandate of the 1980s reforms allowed for (indeed, all but demanded) a higher entertainment quotient in films in the form of comedy, music, romance, and violent action, but the state censorship apparatus nevertheless continued to place reasonably strict official and unofficial limits on the screen depiction of “antisocial” behavior.

In Rock Kids , this new freedom of expression combines with the lingering heavy hand of the censor to produce a curiously contradictory document. Also, the film oscillates uncomfortably between an attempt to dramatize a contemporary social trend and a commercially driven impetus to create a generic coming-of-age melodrama with a music backdrop. Unlike Liu Yiran’s short story, the film’s young male protagonist has a name, and Long Xiang is much less flagrantly antisocial, and also much less charismatic and mercurial than the anti-hero of the original narrative. Instead of a sweaty, self-absorbed, but winningly energetic hedonist, Xiang is little more than a mildly iconoclastic young entrepreneur. He is introduced as a talented participant in the impromptu nightly break dancing jams outside the Forbidden City and a professional performer dissatisfied with the creative restrictions he encounters in his day job as a member of a state-supported dance troupe. Xiang’s subsequent decision to jump into the ocean of the self-employed to pursue his personal muse is represented here as a fundamentally responsible act-it carries the risk of failure, but there are also implied rewards. In a conversation with a dance instructor, Xiang says, “They talk about a hundred flowers blooming. I’ll be a small one myself.” The instructor asks, “Where will you go? What will you do?” to which Xiang replies brightly and optimistically, “I don’t know. But anyway, I’ll be doing what I want to do.”

The film suggests that this kind of individual initiative and a pursuit of self-interest along these lines are acceptably within the guidelines of new era reform-the key is that initiative and self-interest should lead in a socially responsible direction. And here Tian engages in some narrative sleight-of-hand. While Xiang is introduced as a rabid partisan of break dancing, he introduces few of his “street moves” into the professional performances in which he is supposedly free to “express himself” (these exhibitions are an amalgam of rather stale modern dance gyrations peppered with a little Michael Jackson moonwalking). Consequently, the potentially destabilizing abandon of the break dance subculture gets progressively less screen time over the course of the film, and Xiang’s climactic, supposedly triumphant performance is not a dance at all but a decidedly tongsu-style song which Xiang croons on a Vegas-lit stage accompanied by several other singing stars. Within the narrative, this event is a signal that he’s made it professionally and personally, but the musical and visual rhetoric here is that of a very mainstream PRC or Hong Kong television variety show. Any hint of an outlaw status is now expunged from his character-he’s singing a state-sanctioned song in a state-sanctioned style on a state-sanctioned stage.

Other revealing contradictions emerge in Rock Kids through the male protagonist’s relationships with women. Xiang’s girlfriend at the outset of the film is Yuanyuan, who is also a member of the state dance troupe. The couple is first encountered in a scene adapted directly from Liu’s short story, the first three pages of which detail an extended, semi-public romantic encounter. In the story, the male narrator revels in the feelings of passion aroused by locking lips with Yuanyuan: “This is, like, the longest kiss I’ve ever had in my whole life. It’s even longer than the Avenue of Eternal Peace. It knocks my soul right out of my ears and sends it flying into the ozone….” [27] Later in the same scene, after the narrator and Yuanyuan have moved their activities into the elevator of her apartment building, he revels in shocking the older, more circumspect citizens who choose this moment to use the same public conveyance: “Ding! The elevator doors open softly. An old woman is standing outside; her gaze is so cold you could skate on it. We pay no attention, we don’t even see her-we’re wrapped up in our work.” [28]

While not as protracted or startling as it is in the prose version, the cinematic translation of this scene is, especially in comparison with the film’s generally uninspired representation of the world of unofficial music and dance cultures, reasonably faithful to the gleefully licentious tone of Liu’s story. Opening on intimate close-ups of the couple’s hands and feet and widening slightly to show them locked in a passionate embrace, Tian emphasizes the graphic sensuality of the situation to a degree that was perhaps unprecedented in PRC film practice as of the time the film was made. That is, through this initial focus on the physicality of the romantic couple’s relationship, Rock Kids is comparatively successful in its attempt to articulate the characteristics of the PRC’s youth subculture milieu. The theme of sexual expression among some Chinese young people, however, is largely abandoned after this early scene. As the film continues, it turns out that Yuanyuan’s primary function is less as a character and more as a convenient sounding board for and devil’s advocate to Xiang’s free market ambitions. She functions in the story mainly as a symbol of those citizens who are too conservative and timid to understand the importance of the opportunities offered by economic reform. “You dream too much,” she says to Xiang. “I just want to work and live in peace…. You should think about me, and about us. You’re bored, but who isn’t?”

Ultimately, Yuanyuan’s reactionary perspective is explicitly linked with what the filmmakers suggest is an unwholesome sexual aggressiveness. Following the scene in which she scolds Xiang, they go to a rehearsal, after which the couple returns to Yuanyuan’s apartment, having achieved a tentative truce in their personal/ideological argument. They pause outside her door, where Yuanyuan informs Xiang that her roommate is conveniently out of town for the weekend, and would he like to spend the night? At this point, a visibly uncomfortable Xiang demurely declines, and he awkwardly departs. [29] Their relationship fizzles completely soon after this incident, and while Xiang pines for Yuanyuan for an admirable period of time, it’s made clear that the break-up was a fortuitous event, as Yuanyuan was discouraging Xiang from taking full advantage of the new economic opportunities made possible by the country’s benevolent and enlightened leadership.

In any case, Xiang’s suddenly prudish behavior is out of character relative to the sexual enthusiasm he exhibits earlier in the narrative, and it smacks of a sexist and rather traditionalist double standard. In the course of the film, the male protagonist is permitted, and even encouraged, to express and explore his sexuality, both directly (through his relationships with women) and indirectly (through his dance performances).

Female characters, though, do not enjoy such freedom, with one curious exception whose presence in the film constitutes yet another unresolved thematic contradiction. After the final split with Yuanyuan, Xiang flees to the sanctuary of the break dancers outside of the Forbidden City, where he encounters a young woman introduced previously as a follower of the break scene and who is employed as a painter of billboard hoardings. Up to this point, she has been a marginal but charismatic presence in the story-in an earlier scene, she offered forthright and articulate criticism of Xiang’s first televised dance performance, suggesting that it showed “too much Western influence.” Now the painter (who is never identified by name) invites Xiang back to her apartment, which is a shrine to the enlightened, creative, adventurous-but-responsible end of reform era youth culture. Her interest in the contemporary scene is evident through the posters of pop stars that hang on the walls, but more relevant in the setting are the numerous whimsical, small-scale dioramas the painter has constructed using children’s toys (thus illustrating her personal creative energy, and that this energy is channeled in acceptable directions) as well as several oil paintings of female nudes. “Who’s that?” the ever-callow Xiang asks. “It’s me, of course. Do you find it strange? I was a model. It’s nothing-what do you think?” Flustered again by a woman comfortable with her sexual self, Xiang stammers, “I think you’re a special girl.” At this point, the painter goes off on a brief monologue, delivered in a cheery, matter-of-fact tone of voice while she makes tea and brushes her hair:

Am I? I don’t feel like one. I dreamed a lot of being a scientist, an artist, a journalist, a doctor or whatever. But I failed the university entrance exam. My hopes were dashed. Later on I had to work. I’ve met a lot of good people. What’s more, I understand one point: the job isn’t important, it’s your attitude. Now I work hard and live freely. So long as you achieve something…. Now I don’t dream about fame, so long as tomorrow’s better than today.

The painter punctuates the main part of this recitation by claiming that she’s “talking rubbish,” but it’s made clear that she’s not. In fact, she is portrayed as something of a revolutionary heroine for the new era whose political enlightenment does not seem to exist in opposition to her sexual liberation. Her words provide the validation of his own decisions that Xiang has needed to hear-the painter’s words stand as a manifesto for a kinder, gentler youth subculture that might jolt their elders at times, but also implicitly appreciates the possibilities offered by the CCP engineers of the new era. It is also a subculture that can be counted on to express itself in moderation.

In Rock Kids, then, the themes of Liu Yiran’s bold and adventurous short story are clawed back into the mainstream of official culture, their antisocial and potentially destabilizing implications defused by filing off the sharp edges of the youth subculture depicted. This is accomplished by transforming the male protagonist from a liumang deviant into an earnest explorer of the new realm of private enterprise, and by transforming the musical base of the subculture from earthshaking rock and rap to decorous tongsu. It seems clear that Tian Zhuangzhuang was interested in this project because of a genuine fascination with the enormous changes in Chinese culture that were occurring at the time (and which continue today). His ability to be faithful to the letter and spirit of Liu’s story was probably doomed from the outset, though. This was in part, I assume, because of a lack of experience with the mainly Western formal conventions (developed especially in the world of music video) for capturing on film the intensity of louder and more abrasive forms of popular music. As a result, the musical numbers in Rock Kids are uniformly derivative, static and inexpressive.

More significantly, though, Tian’s failure to capture on film what Liu crystallized in print was caused also by the lingering shadow of the state censorship apparatus, perhaps combined with a willingness on Tian’s part to make thematic and aesthetic concessions to the new demands of the marketplace. The same immediate pre-June 4 time frame saw the production of four films based on Wang Shuo novels, including Mi Jiashan’s The Troubleshooters/Wanzhu and Huang Jianxin’s Samsara. These properties, like Liu’s short story, centered on the activities of various “urban riffraff,” but the best of the Wang projects maintained a strong sense of the author’s inversely politicized (and inevitably controversial) social commentary. So the failure of Rock Kids to effectively mine this fertile ground may be most symptomatic of the dilemmas and conflicts facing Chinese intellectuals in the context of Cultural Fever. Tian’s previous films were stylistically challenging, rather cerebral efforts characteristic of the least audience-friendly end of the Fifth Generation spectrum. On this project, he may well have felt overwhelmed by the apparent contradictions between a desire to make a relevant artistic and social statement and the demand to make a film that actually had a chance to earn a profit.

Thus it is in a sense fitting that the film ends on a note of irresolution. Following his successful transformation from a hooligan break dancer into a mainstream tongsu singer, Xiang spends the night with the painter. We see them on the morning after, with Xiang lying shirtless and sleepy among rumpled bedclothes. The painter, wearing only a short nightgown, enters the frame carrying Xiang’s breakfast. She casually strips and gets dressed for work; as she leaves, she hands Xiang a key to her apartment, saying, “Take it if you want it. Leave it here if you don’t.” The painter leaves, and Xiang sits up on the bed and looks at the key. The scene fades out as he ponders his next move, which seems to have both private and public ramifications; will he successfully reconcile his newly accepted responsibilities in the service of the state with his personal desires?

Beijing Bastards: liumang in excelsis

China’s Cultural Fever broke with the events of June 1989, and the crackdown on political and cultural dissidents following the Beijing massacre was indeed sweeping and brutal. In addition to the hundreds of protesters killed in the streets of Beijing by the PLA, thousands more students, workers, intellectuals, artists, and other activists were arrested, harassed, or forced into retirement or exile. A small number of those arrested were unlucky enough to be executed, but many more received a show trial followed by substantial prison terms, or went directly to prison without the pretence of a hearing. [30]

In the arts and culture, as Paul Pickowicz suggests, “the first instinct of the state” after June 4th “was to revert to the crude Stalinist mode of control.” [31] New restrictions were placed on expression in all media, including film and popular music. Directives were handed down mandating the production of a cycle of overtly propagandistic “command films,” and the state-controlled popular music industry also was advised to emphasize the patriotic content of songs. For observers inside and outside of China, it seemed almost like a return to pre-reform era standards.

Consequently, to Western eyes, Beijing Bastards seems at first glance an inexplicable anomaly, perhaps even a miracle. Here, after all, is a film about liumang culture produced in the wake of the post-Tiananmen crackdown that is entirely free of the thematic, narrative, and stylistic compromises that crucially hindered the makers of Rock Kids when they set out to document and evoke the excitement of China’s unofficial popular culture of the 1980s. In place of the conventional linearity of the earlier film, Beijing Bastards is aggressively loose and anecdotal-it doesn’t so much tell a story as it explores, in a semi-documentary style, the milieu of Beijing’s subculture of alienated and/or unemployed adolescents and young adults, and the ways in which Western-style rock music fits into that subculture. Instead of the awkwardly schematic characters created in Rock Kids largely as mouthpieces for different points of view on the subcultural scene, Beijing Bastards offers an array of characters rendered as (sometimes exasperatingly) incomplete sketches, yet who are rendered simultaneously authentic-and frequently rather unsympathetic-thanks to their inarticulateness, their lack of physical attractiveness, and their often loutish behavior. Instead of the watered-down disco and tongsu musical numbers that failed to appeal to the target audience when Rock Kids was released, Beijing Bastards features music by some of the genuine heavyweights of the first wave of Chinese rock, including Cui Jian, Dou Wei, and He Yong. And unlike Rock Kids, which apparently didn’t earn much money but was created within the system and therefore received the blessing of a general theatrical release, the creators of Beijing Bastards knew while they were making it that the film’s content, and their mode of production, would ensure that it would not be shown in China for the foreseeable future.

So how did Beijing Bastards get produced at all? The answer to that question lies in the peculiar relationship that developed during the 1980s and 1990s between Chinese state authorities and Chinese artists, especially those who were working in areas of “unofficial” culture. As the ideology of the market began to compete with and even overwhelm the ideology of state control over all forms of expression, the Chinese government realized that in order to maintain its authority in areas of culture and the arts, it would have to adapt to the new situation. As Geremie Barme and Paul Pickowicz have shown, the strategy that emerged was analogous to that developed in the Soviet bloc in the early 1980s, when the countries of Eastern Europe were experiencing similar economic and culture upheavals. At that time, Pickowicz argues:

[t]he cultural strategy of the more mature and self-confident state socialist regime (plagued with economic problems) amounted to gently placing artists in a comfortable “velvet prison.” It was more efficient for the state to flatter and bribe artists by offering them perquisites and a chance to wield a bit of power than to continue to bludgeon them with the familiar instruments of crude censorship. Artists were no longer restricted to doing agitprop work; they could travel abroad and could even obtain approval to recycle the outmoded cultural refuse of contemporary capitalist societies. All that was required was their loyalty (passive or active) to the state. Expressions of a non-Marxist mentality were acceptable: anti-Marxism was not. An advantage of the system was that the state had the option to revert, however briefly, to Stalinist modes of control and assimilation. [32]

As described by Pickowicz and Barme, the Chinese version of the “velvet prison” for cultural workers took shape in relation to the economic reforms of the 1980s. The state came to actively encourage the creation of novels, movies, television programs, and music that consciously imitated the entertainment-oriented styles of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Hollywood. Artists who wanted to make something a little edgier could do so as well, especially if they were able to reach a substantial paying audience, but only if they were also willing to engage in a modicum of self-censorship-again, “non-Marxism” okay, “anti-Marxism” not. The Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers that emerged in the mid-1980s (e.g., Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Huang Jianxin, Tian Zhuangzhuang) worked within this framework; in most instances, the government had fewer objections to the content of their films than to the fact that most of them were “too artistic” and therefore failed to earn a profit.

As a result, as Pickowicz points out (and this is crucial to an understanding of the production economy of Beijing Bastards):

on the eve of Tiananmen it was clear that the state was no longer willing to subsidize [art films]. But it was agreed that filmmakers could try to raise money outside China for coproductions or productions entirely financed by foreign capital. [33]

Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige pioneered and perfected this fiscal strategy in the production of films such as Ju dou (1990, funded by Japanese interests), Raise the Red Lantern (1991, Taiwan via Hong Kong), Farewell My Concubine (1993, Taiwan), and Temptress Moon (1996, Taiwan), all of which were either edited for release or temporarily banned in China-not primarily because the films were considered politically sensitive, but because their makers were accused of pandering to the desires of foreign audiences to see an exotic, decadent, and socially unevolved version of China. [34]

As these examples indicate, this alternative approach to funding film projects remained available (at least to directors like Zhang who had achieved an international reputation) even during the dark days of the post-Tiananmen crackdown on political and artistic expression. In fact, it can be said that there is more continuity than disruption in the economic and cultural trajectory from Rock Kids to Beijing Bastards. The overt assault on artists (though not on political dissidents) proved temporary, with the pre-June 4th status quo of the velvet prison substantially re-established by 1992. While the events of the Beijing Spring interrupted the progress of the transformations during the 1980s of Chinese arts and culture, once the social and political firmament was deemed secure, there was a return to the master narrative of reform, in which there’s more than one way to promote “market socialism.”

Consequently, a scanning of the production credits for Beijing Bastards shows that the film received funding from investors in the Netherlands, and that the film’s producers are listed as Cui Jian (the PRC rock star with overseas connections), Zhang Yuan (the film’s director), Shu Kei (a Hong Kong director, producer, critic, and social activist), and Chris Doyle (the Australian cinematographer best known for his work with Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai). That is, the film’s creators took advantage of the policy allowing artists to seek overseas funding for projects that were either too expensive or too thematically audacious for the state’s cultural/industrial mechanism. In the case of Beijing Bastards, the impetus was definitely the latter, as the production budget was minimal. The film’s matter-of-fact, non-judgmental portrayal of liumang culture definitely did not fit within the parameters of officially sanctioned moral or political correctness. [35]

But exactly what kind of portrayal is this of alienated youth and the music they listen to? Insofar as Beijing Bastards has a plot at all, it concerns a late-adolescent boy and girl (Kazi and Maomao, although we don’t even learn their names until midway through the film) who at the beginning of the film are walking on a rainy, deserted urban street and arguing over her apparently just-revealed pregnancy. Maomao is seeking some sign of communication, reassurance, closeness, but Kazi is casually dismissive-“If you had the kid, what would you do? Let’s just get rid of it.” Her response is to blow off this jerk. “Forget it. I’ll deal with this myself,” she says, whereupon she leaves and all but disappears until the very end of the film. This offhandedly rendered introduction provides an equally blasé catalyst for the rest of the film’s “narrative,” which consists mostly of Kazi wandering among his and Maomao’s familiar haunts (clubs, restaurants, homes of friends) looking for his lost girlfriend. In many of these side trips, Kazi disappears altogether, as the filmmakers introduce us in an insistently non-linear way to the loosely aligned network of friends and acquaintances within this particular slice of liumang culture. Among these are a few cynical and jaded painters, a couple of comparatively articulate young women of indeterminate profession or ambition, and three male buddies who mostly get drunk and swear at each other. Intercut with these slices of Beijing slacker life are a succession of rehearsals and performances by the musicians featured on the soundtrack, most prominently Cui Jian, who also appears as a version of himself within some of the film’s narrative vignettes.

That is, whereas Rock Kids plays like the official culture’s attempt to be down with the kids (not unlike Hollywood’s break dancing movies of the early 80s), Beijing Bastards feels like the real deal. This sense of immediacy and authenticity comes significantly from the strategic appropriation of a semi-documentary style (no doubt selected also because it reduced the production budget substantially). Among the conventional markers of cinematic realism in evidence are location shooting, the use of a non-professional cast, a privileging of the long take, and the frequent use of a hand-held camera. The actual degree of authenticity in this portrayal of the liumang lifestyle is open to question in some areas; for instance, Cui Jian is represented as a scuffling underground rocker forced to do battle with callous landlords for rehearsal space and to unload his own equipment at gigs. While most non-mainstream performers may indeed find themselves assigned this relatively lowly status within the pecking order of PRC popular music culture, by the time Beijing Bastards was made Cui was China’s closest equivalent of a Springsteen/U2 arena rocker, and not likely to arrive for a show sardined into a wheezing van with the rest of his band.

But the most interesting aspect of Beijing Bastards, I think, has less to do with its portrayal of the lives of underground musicians in China, and more with the ways in which its makers engage with the broader implications of liumang culture, which also persisted as an observable social phenomenon in the years after June 4th. In keeping with John Minford’s reflections in the mid-1980s, Zhang Yuan is intrigued by the ambiguity suggested by the modern manifestation of Chinese hooliganism. The extreme alienation and terminal cynicism characteristic of the liumang persona can be regarded as socially disruptive-in a progressive sense-in that even a cursory analysis shows it to be both a by-product and a highly visible auto-critique of a rather corrupt and internally contradictory authoritarian regime. On the other hand, the liumang persona usually becomes manifest as chronic narcissistic moping rather than organized activity pursuing some idea of positive change. It constitutes a way of seeing the world that (in its emphasis on self-interest) creates an environment in which the participants in the subculture can be both self-destructive and visit genuine hurt and pain on each other.

It might be argued, then, that Beijing Bastards operates as a methodologically un-rigorous anthropological critique of the slice of the post-Tiananmen liumang scene that also revolves around the growing pains of an indigenous alternative music culture. Some aspects of this demographic slice of contemporary China are portrayed sympathetically, even romantically, while others are taken to task. The most positive representations involve the implied social role of the new, alternative musical forms and the musicians who play it. The frenzied and euphoric crowds of young people responding to performances of the raucous bands led by Cui Jian, Dou Wei, and He Yong support the notion that these singers are, with considerable legitimacy, articulating the thoughts and feelings of the younger generation, and doing so in ways that stand above and beyond the articulations of the mainstream music industry. Also, the general parameters of this scene are portrayed favorably in that implicit throughout the film is the fact that the language and behavior of its participants are a profound affront to the sensibilities of China’s ruling regime. Seeing these militantly directionless young people staggering around drunk, engaging in casual sex, and urinating on walls in public places is a shock to the official system precisely because these people and this behavior are among the more logical side-effects of reform.

This more hopeful and positive perspective on alienated youth in contemporary China is most forcefully expressed, I think, in a long, moody quasi-montage sequence midway through the film, during which Cui Jian performs his song “The last complaint”. This slow-burning, emotionally intense anthem begins with these words (first spoken by Cui without accompaniment, then performed with his band):

I remember that day-
I was hardly pure of heart.
I’m walking straight into the wind, anger in my soul.
I don’t know when I was hurt, but I’m inspired by the pain.
I want to find the source of that rage,
But I can only walk into the wind….

The first visual images of the sequence are a succession of ordinary Beijing street scenes-cars, buses, and people on bicycles in the rain of a gray summer morning. This is followed by a traveling shot (from a moving car) past Tiananmen Square and the adjoining, imposing front façade of the Forbidden City, with Mao’s portrait gazing serenely out over the square. On the one hand, these spaces have been figured unto cliché (by the PRC government as well as miscellaneous foreign commentators) as symbols of China’s historical magnificence, and of the post-1949 revolutionary culture that eradicated the feudal ideology manifested in the imperial palace complex. However, ever since the spring of 1989, these spaces are inhabited by as many ghosts as tourists-they have become chronic reminders of the failures of the current regime and its capacity for brutality. [36] None of these historical or recent memories are called up explicitly in the film. To the contrary, these shots of heavily symbolic public spaces are evocative especially because they are filmed in the same dispassionate, quasi-documentary style used to shoot the more quotidian locations in which much of the rest of the film is set. In a sense, Tiananmen and the Forbidden City are stripped here of the veneer of tradition and history; rendering them at ground level, in the rain, makes them more ordinary and dissolves their mystique. [37]

Following these shots, there is a dissolve to Cui performing “The last complaint,” the lyrics of which carry an ambiguity that is not unusual among creators of unofficial (and even some official) cultural product during the reform era. On the one hand, the song can be read as a chronicle of a bitter personal relationship, but in this context (Cui’s association with the student movement and his status as an “official rebel,” the juxtaposition of the lyrics with the shots of Tiananmen) it’s also easy enough to interpret it as an icy commentary on the sense of betrayal and loss felt by the students and workers who participated in the events of the Beijing Spring. Still, the more personal connotations return late in the sequence, when Zhang cuts in shots of Maomao in a hospital operating room, apparently either giving birth or having an abortion, and of Kazi staring out the window of his flat, still unaware of Maomao’s whereabouts.

This last, tenuously narrative thread obliquely suggests the qualities of liumang culture that are rendered less sympathetically in Beijing Bastards, namely (as I’ve suggested earlier) its self-absorption, solipsism, and self-destructive tendencies. In fact, the focal point of this criticism is Kazi himself. Nominally the film’s protagonist, Kazi consistently behaves like a sullen and thoroughly unpleasant thug. In the opening scene, he manages to alienate Maomao (and the viewer) by demonstrating that he’s exclusively concerned about the complicating effects of her pregnancy on his life. In the ensuing sequences in which he appears, Kazi continues to whine to anyone willing to listen just what a pain all of this is for him. This desultory journey culminates late in the film in a scene in a subway station in which Kazi’s half-hearted sexual overtures are rejected by a female acquaintance. Here, in his longest spoken passage, he addresses the camera directly, meaning that his chronic griping is now aimed right at the viewer:

This sort of girl pisses me off. She can’t be compared to Maomao. Haven’t a clue to where Maomao’s gone. Haven’t seen her for two weeks now. If she’s dead, or has run away with someone else, I can deal with it. What I can’t bear is her disappearing without a trace. It makes you feel like life is really pointless, like you’re suddenly alone in this big space. It’s a real pain. I can take it, but I don’t like it.

Implicit in this liumang soliloquy is the temporal and cognitive distance between contemporary (postmodern, globalized) popular zeitgeists and the official ideology of the Chinese state, which even in the reform era emphasizes the virtue of collective action in pursuit of the common good and the achievement of an idealized market socialism (as defined by the CCP) at some point in the future. By contrast, in his inarticulate way, Kazi articulates one of the competing, unofficial ideologies of the reform era, in which immediate gratification and the individual self are paramount-and for many people in China (even in burgeoning urban centers), this is in part because the future (now defined significantly in economic terms) looks reasonably bleak.

But while this back story perhaps makes Kazi more comprehensible, in the film itself it doesn’t make him a more pleasant character. That is, in Beijing Bastards, Kazi (and some of his liumang compatriots) are set up as a cautionary counterbalance to any tendency viewers might have to overemphasize the scurrilously romantic outlaw tendencies of the rock-inflected youth subculture of the PRC[38]

By way of a conclusion

Anthony Giddens’s notion of time-space compression is readily observable in China today. The two films I have focused upon in this essay were produced quite recently in historical terms, but after the turn of a new millennium both are perhaps most interesting in the ongoing narration of contemporary China as documentations of moments now superceded by the tide of more recent events and trends. Rock Kids  marks a point in the evolution of reform era popular culture when it was both politically possible and fiscally prudent to express ideas and actions that would have been banned only a few years earlier. However, the film’s producers recognized that even in this newly permissive atmosphere there were still significant constraints on what was permitted within the mainstream film industry. As a result, their adaptation of Liu Yiran’s story self-consciously deflects the political implications and aspirations of the subcultural scene being scrutinized, and turns the story into a quest for personal fulfillment and success in accordance with officially sanctioned reform era norms.

A few years later, and after the explosion/implosion/suppression of Cultural Fever following the Beijing Spring of 1989, the makers of Beijing Bastards  took advantage of the fact that the State, despite its post-June 4th crackdown on unorthodox political expression, continued to allow certain forms of dissidence to exist-the litmus test being whether the State perceived a dissident expression to be a threat to its own hegemony. In some ways, this was a good example of a velvet prison production. Unlike, for instance, Mapantsula  in South Africa in 1988 (or Hour of the Furnaces  [Argentina 1968] and other famous South American radical films of the 1960s), Zhang Yuan wasn’t forced to shoot his project in secret; in fact, Orville Schell reports the film crew’s utterly non-confrontational encounter with representatives of the Public Service Bureau while shooting an all-night rock ‘n’ roll bacchanalia at a horse track outside Beijing. [39] Zhang’s conflict with the government over Beijing Bastards  came later, when the film was shown at overseas film festivals (it won a prize at Locarno). It was at this point that he, like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige before him, was accused of airing China’s dirty laundry in public. [40]

This contradictory but nonetheless tangible policy shift may have pragmatic origins, but it is also oddly suggestive of a certain maturing of perspective within a quintessentially authoritarian (and therefore fundamentally immature) system. As Andrew Nathan has explained, the Party:

has diminished the range of social activities it purports to control in comparison to the totalitarian ambitions of its Maoist years. It has fitted its goals of control more to its means and no longer aspires to change human nature. It has learned that many areas of freedom are unthreatening to the monopoly of political power. [41]

The government quite successfully crushed the student/worker coalition of the late Eighties. It has been generally satisfied with its efforts to depoliticize university campuses, and even at times to whip students into a closely supervised “patriotic” frenzy when it suits the government’s purposes. [42] Accordingly, the purported threat to social stability manifested by liumang  culture and its adherents, and by nascent youth subcultures more broadly defined, have been less prominent in the official pronouncements that continue to stand in for a significant percentage of news reporting in China.

Meanwhile, the indigenous alternative popular music scene has continued to grow, if not precisely flourish. Many municipal and provincial bureaucracies and officials continue to give non-mainstream performers a certain amount of grief (a few prominent bands such as NO and The Fly have been banned from live performance altogether[43] ), radio and club programming continues to be dominated by tongsu  and gangtai , and revenue streams are limited-playing unofficial music is still no way to actually earn a living. Still, the scene has become much more musically diverse; in addition to the hard rock that dominated in the 1980s, there are accomplished groups and solo performers working in a range of styles recognizable in the West, including trance, industrial, power pop, techno, and rap. [44]  Also, as Jeroen de Kloet has observed, the music of most younger rockers is not overtly political in the way that Cui Jian’s was in the Eighties, but the cultural politics of anomie, disillusionment, and boredom continue to be broadly central to their creative drive. At this point, it might be argued that the most serious problem facing alternative musicians is the endemic software piracy that blankets China-while legal compact discs and cassettes recorded by alternative musicians can be found in some music stores in large cities, many more are sold in stores and markets that quite openly deal in bootleg merchandise (this trade also includes-indeed is dominated by- recordings by mainstream performers).

The Chinese government continues to track internal enemies, though. The most spectacular example of this in recent years came when all of the conventional Leninist mechanisms of surveillance, propaganda, and iron-fisted suppression were brought to bear on the predominantly middle-aged adherents of the quasi-spiritual movement Falun Gong. Meanwhile, the structure of the velvet prison for cultural workers remains largely in place, and the implications of this arrangement continue to be controversial among domestic and overseas critics. Geremie Barme quite forthrightly regards Zhang Yuan as an opportunistic fraud, a faux  dissident looking for the main chance by making movies on sensational topics that will appeal to overseas audiences. [4] Paul Pickowicz agrees that the subversive potential of a project like Beijing Bastards  is minimal, but he is less dismissive of these expressions of unofficial culture (whatever their creators’ motivations). He suggests that cultural artifacts like Beijing Bastards (and by extension even “ancestors” like Rock Kids) are part of a sea change in China’s political and social order that has cumulatively and progressively eroded the power of the State to control the destinies of the people, and that ultimately the State brought this on itself: “[W]ith the deepening of the reform era, much is permanently out of control.” [46]

That is, the Communist Party’s move away from compulsively micromanaging the public and private lives of Chinese citizens was the product not of political or ethical enlightenment, but of an institutional compulsion for self-preservation. The government has calculated that the areas in which it has loosened (though by no means relinquished) its grip, including many forms of cultural expression, are largely extraneous to the affairs of state it deems crucial to maintaining its authority. However, by failing to take into account the fact that micro-level cultural expression is inspired by, and created in relation to, the macro-level policies and institutions that both artists and ordinary people are confronted with in their daily lives, the government’s equation may be excluding some significant variables. One symptom of this: near the end of Beijing Bastards, the film’s anti-anti-hero Kazi is hauled away by the police, not for engaging in unauthorized political activity but for beating up a cynical bar patron who complained within earshot of Kazi about the supposed musical inadequacies of Chinese rockers. After a temporal ellipsis of undetermined duration (it’s only a few minutes later in the film), in quick succession we see Kazi back on the street, his hair now in a prison buzz cut; Kazi going into an apartment building, where he encounters Maomao, who informs him that “Our baby is born”; and an ever-impassive Kazi outside again, continuing to wander aimlessly and fading into the crowd as he has done throughout the film. At this point, we hear a baby’s cry on the soundtrack-a highly conventional symbol of rebirth, but in this context perhaps signaling just another ennui-ridden cycle of existence. [47] Zhang Yuan, however, chooses to conclude the film on a note of cautious hope by playing another Cui Jian anthem under the final shots of Beijing street life. The lyrics of the song link the personal and the political in ways that continue to be largely incomprehensible to China’s rulers:

I’m ready for it, the truth, the lies,
The garbage-it’s all got to come out.
Suddenly there’s a mass movement in front of my eyes
Changing my life like a revolution.
A girl brings her love to me
And it’s like wind and rain in my face.

Endnotes

[1] Quoted in Jeroen de Kloet, “‘Let him fucking see the green smoke beneath my groin’: the mythology of Chinese rock”, in Postmodernism and China, eds. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 254.
[2] Richard Kraus, “China’s artists between plan and market,” in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, eds. Deborah S. Davis et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 175.
[3] Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 38.
[4] Zhang (106-109) discusses other examples of youth-oriented films from this period.
[5] Marilyn Manson, for example, may have been one of the more calculated music marketing mechanisms of the 1990s, but the key to the band’s success was that they made decent hard rock and that their presentational mode provided a certain jolt to parents, teachers, and other icons of adult authority. This latter factor was a significant source of pleasure for many of Manson’s adolescent fans, and is fundamentally inseparable from the pleasures generated by the music itself. And this phenomenon in turn translates into a platinum sales volume, which suits the late capitalist purposes of the recording industry just fine.
[6] Even within this closed culture, though, outside influences continued to be felt. For a discussion of this subject in relation to the PRC film industry before the Cultural Revolution, see Gina Marchetti, “Two Stage Sisters: the blossoming of a revolutionary aesthetic”, in Transnational Chinese Cinemas, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 59-80.
[7] Hao Huang, “Border crossings: rocking the Great Wall”, Chinese Music 21 (1998), 16.
[8] Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Mass media and transnational subjectivity in Shanghai: notes on (re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese metropolis”, in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 290-1.
[9]Yang, 291-2.
[10] The stronger market position of Hong Kong and Taiwanese music in the mainland is, I think, the result of listener preferences based on considerations of cultural proximity, and on the fact that it’s easier for ethnically Chinese businesspeople to do business in China. For a discussion of the concept of cultural proximity, see Joseph Straubhaar, “Beyond media imperialism: asymmetrical interdependence and cultural proximity,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8 (1991): 39-59.
[11]See also Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, “Chinese cinemas (1896-1996) and transnational film studies,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas, 1-31.
[12]Donald Nonini and Aihwa Ong, “Chinese transnationalism as an alternative modernity”, in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 26.
[13]Andrew Jones, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1992), 28.
[14] Jones, 3.
[15] In tongsu, songwriters generally are considered to be the most important creators of this music, not the singers who perform it.
[16]Cui’s career is indicative of several trends, so I’ll recount it briefly. In the mid-1980s, he ditched his “iron rice bowl” as a trumpet player with the Beijing Philharmonic, and after some tentative early efforts as a quasi-tongsu crooner became the first important musician to put the Chinese version of rock on the map in the PRC. He sings in a rough, guttural voice, and his often elliptically topical songs are performed with a tight, percussive, guitar-and-keyboard-driven sound, with a mild leavening of traditional Chinese instruments. Today, he is successful enough to be considered old and obsolete by some younger, “second wave” musicians and fans. Cui has survived by adopting a strategy that is familiar to many alternative artists in contemporary China: he negotiates offshore recording deals, and he cooperates with the State when both parties find some mutual advantage in such collaboration. For instance, Cui was able to participate in a domestic concert tour promoting the Asian Games only a few months after the June 4 massacre, despite the fact that he had performed for student and worker demonstrators on Tiananmen Square. In planning the tour, the government weighed Cui’s celebrity status against his dissident status and decided that the former was more important and that the latter could be managed (the tour, however, was cut short after Cui declined to “tone down” his performances).
[17]Kraus, 176-7.
[18]More recently, the exponential growth of the Internet in China since the late 1990s has further accelerated this trend, thanks both to the Net’s global reach (despite efforts by the Chinese government to restrict user access) and to phenomena such as file-sharing programs that facilitate the exchange of sound and video materials.
[19] Huang, 18.
[2] Jones, 3.
[21] The portion of the story with which I am familiar was excerpted as Liu Yiran, “Rocking Tiananmen,” in New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, eds. Geremie Barme and Linda Jaivin (New York: Times Books, 1992), 5-22. It seems, in fact, that Tian and Liu discussed making a movie version of the story even before Liu had finished writing it, in that Liu’s narrator makes self-reflexive reference to a discussion that he’s had on this topic with Tian, who is identified by name in the story. Given his PLA status, Liu himself would seem to have been at some demographic remove from his narrator, as well as his age at the time (early thirties, rather than the protagonist’s implied twenty-something).
[22] Liu, 18.
[23] See Chris Berry, “The Fifth Generation faces the bottom line”, in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, ed. Berry (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 114-125; Esther C.M. Yau, “International fantasy and the ‘new Chinese cinema'”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14 (1993): 95-107; and Paul Pickowicz, “Velvet prisons and the political economy of Chinese filmmaking,” in Deborah S. Davis (ed), Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in post-Mao China (Washington, D.C.; Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge University Press, 1995), 193-220.
[24] See Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) for comprehensive discussions of the phenomenon.
[25] See the brief discussion of the history of the term in Geremie Barme, In the Red (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 62-67, and see also the more comprehensive account in Harold Tanner, “The offense of hooliganism and the moral dimension of China’s pursuit of modernity, 1979-1996”, Twentieth Century China 26 (2000), 1-40.
[26] Quoted in Barme, 64.
[27] Liu, 5.
[28] Liu, 7.
[29] There is no parallel event in Liu’s original story: his male protagonist is once and always an unrepentant hedonist.
[30]For a compressed account of the crackdown, see Orville Schell, Mandate of Heaven (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 164-182.
[31] Pickowicz, 211.
[32] Pickowicz, 194-5.
[33] Pickowicz, 212.
[34] Pickowicz (213) quotes one especially exasperated Chinese critic, who complained privately, “Zhang Yimou makes his living by pulling down his mother’s pants so foreigners can get a good look at her ass.” For additional discussion of these controversies, see Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 142-172.
[35] Also, as Shannon May points out (156-157), had PRC audiences been able to see Beijing Bastards at the time it was “released,” it’s likely that they would have noticed something odd right at the beginning of the film: “At the beginning of each Chinese film produced since 1951, two standard frames [sic] appear in sequence: the government issued license number followed by the name of the State studio responsible for the project. Beijing Bastards lacks the frame displaying the distribution license number. Centered in the following frame is not the name of one of the sixteen State studios, but rather Beijing Bastards Raw Shot Production Group.” Shannon May, “Power and trauma in Chinese film: experiences of Zhang Yuan and the Sixth Generation,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8 (2003): 156-160.
[36] Schell provides a highly instructive brief cultural history of Tiananmen Square in Mandate of Heaven (15-30), a chronicle that also helps us to understand why, more recently, members of the Falun Gong recurrently used the Square as a primary locus of their demonstrations against the sect’s suppression by the Chinese government. The Square is a highly visible space, but it also has enormous symbolic significance for the Chinese people.
[37]Zhang Yuan’s next film was The Square (1994), a documentary meditation on the cultural significance of Tiananmen as a geographical, cultural, and political locale. Like Beijing Bastards, it has never been released in China.
[38]And, given the film’s production history, this cautionary perspective may be quite specifically aimed at Western viewers.
[39] Schell’s account (323-6) includes this passage: “By dark, two huge bonfires had been lit in the middle of the track. Several freshly slaughtered goats hung undecorously from a hitching post by the entrance, and knots of young men dressed in high black boots, tight trousers, black T-shirts, and leather jackets milled around in the flickering firelight, chatting, laughing, smoking, drinking beer, and mingling with a contingent of unusually attractive and modishly attired young women. Not only were these people unlike the poster figures of ruddy-cheeked model workers, peasants, and soldiers that the Party had once put out, but they were also starkly different from the earnest, righteous, and politically didactic young students who had filled Tiananmen Square.”
[40] Pickowicz, 219.
[41] Andrew Nathan, “Introduction: the documents and their significance,” in The Tiananmen Papers, compiled Liang Zhang, eds. Nathan and Perry Link (London: Little, Brown, 2001), xxxix.
[42] Examples include the demonstrations that followed the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, the Hainan Island spy plane incident of 2001, and the furor in early 2005 over glaringly revisionist passages concerning the Nanjing massacre and related events in Japanese history textbooks.
[43] de Kloet, 255.
[44] Joeren de Kloet has documented this diversity in some very useful field research: the previously cited essay in Postmodernism and China; “To seek beautiful dreams: rock in China,” Oideion 2, 2001,http://iias.leidenuniv.nl/oideion/journal/issue02/kloet/index-a.html and “Rock in a hard place: commercial fantasies in China’s music industry,” in Media in China: Consumption, Content, and Crisis, eds. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Michael Keane, and Yin Hong (London: Routledge, 2002), 93-104.
[45] Barme, 189-197.
[46] Pickowicz, 218.
[47] A similar trope was used by Huang Jianxin to conclude his liumang film Samsara (adapted from a Wang Shuo story) a few years earlier.

Created on: Monday, 11 July 2005 | Last Updated: Wednesday, 27 July 2005