The Rise and Fall of Chinese Punk: A Legacy of Youth No Longer Silent

When Australian filmmaker Shaun Jefford came to Beijing in the midst of 2008 Olympic fever to make the documentary Beijing Punk, punk was already dying in China. As in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cry “Sell out!” could be heard in the background. In the UK a steel safety-pin pushed through the nose was replaced by a gold clip-on as a fashion statement. In China, the UK flag, and the de facto symbol of Chinese punk, had degenerated into a logo on a student handbag or an icon to decorate a cash-filled wallet.

But punk doesn't die; it's assimilated. Anti-establishment becomes established. According to Leijun, lead singer of Misandao – one of the bands most featured in Beijing Punk – primetime for the movement was 1999, when it all kicked off, before attitudes changed with the lure of commercialism and rebellion made way for the conventional.

So is it all over? Even now, as Jefford's Beijing Punkgets some of its first showings in Western art-house cinemas, are people seeing the documentation of a dying movement? Perhaps. But perhaps punk – in China as anywhere – was never supposed to last, but rather to serve as a catalyst. As it dies, it has served its purpose.

In 2002 I turned on CCTV to see the highlights of the World Cup one day and was greeted with funeral music. A mournful piano meandered its tearful way in the background to balls being kicked and goals being scored, so I waited for further news of a tragedy. Maybe a plane had crashed with an entire team on board. Maybe one of the stadiums had suffered a terrorist attack and thousands had died. But no – the highlights were over and we were returned to the smiling presenters. Clearly all was well.

I was aghast. Back home, football highlights are accompanied by a musical frenzy as accompaniment to the thrill of tackles made and balls hitting the back of the net to an ecstatic crowd response. But in China? The music says it all.

Stay calm. Don't get excited. Relax.

Such is the message of nearly all mainstream Chinese pop music. Tear-jerker ballads, maudlin love songs – these are the staple fare for Chinese youth tuning into the nation's broadcast media. Only brass bands playing patriotic songs are allowed to galvanise. It is so soporific that, as a teacher, I had to ban students from playing Chinese pop music on the computer during lesson breaks; if they listened to it, by the time the break was over they were all muzzy.

I like a good love song but wall-to-wall, with no release from the maudlin soppy-sloppiness of it all, it's just miserable. A wistful refrain is often there in the background of youth, but it shouldn't be the whole damned soundtrack.

Exploding into the midst of this, punk was always too alien. Jefford’s film – banned in China, with its trailers and other references often blocked on the net – is a documentary of a movement that was never going to have any appeal in more than a few of the sometimes brightest, sometimes darkest corners of Chinese youth culture; those most open to something new and those most angry and disillusioned. Ornery and challenging in the West, transplanted into China it became a freak; too aggressive, too unconventional and too hard for a love-song softened youth.

However, as in the West, so in China the value of punk is being felt not in its heyday, but in its legacy. The West needed punk to rise and fall to free youth culture from the hands of multinationals and media empires. In the wake of punk, youth stopped merely consuming and started to create, create not only the new sounds through which they expressed themselves but new labels, new media for their distribution. More and more small venues opened up for live music to meet the growing need of performers and audiences looking to create or consume something different. Punk gave way to post-punk, to electro, and then to house and trance. Ska emerged on punk's peripheries and an edgier R&B sound. People began to make music in their bedrooms or in garages. New music exploded... and precisely the same is happening now in China. Chinese students are eschewing traditional dance classes and buying guitars. Underground venues are proliferating. Bands are producing their own CDs, which they distribute themselves at gigs and through local shops or on the internet. There's new music, fresh music, original music, music that comes from the heart of its creators and not the soulless product of the media machine. Chinese youth is becoming creative. Very creative indeed.

As with New Music, so too with New Art in general. No longer constrained by conventions, painters are taking traditional Chinese styles and experimenting with them. Chinese painting and sculpture is becoming mischievous in playing with the establishment and art colleges are becoming more inclined to show off star students who not only know the rules, but also know how to break them. More and more of China's youth now pick up a camera to photograph the absurd, the witty, the informative, the unusual, the emotive rather than lining up their friends in front of some monument on the Chinese tourist trail to flick Vs and smile.

Punk, with its anger and its aggression, was always going to destroy itself. It offered outrage, but no alternative. But in railing against the conventions it has left a legacy of a youth no longer willing to sit back and take what is offered, a youth ever more creative and self-expressive.

Punk was never an alternative – but it has helped to create alternatives. Having done so, as in the West, it will live on forever in the heart of the new.
 

Related links
An Education: How China’s System Differs from the West’s
Major Advantage: How Trends in Higher Ed Are Shaping China’s Future
City of Sound: The Noisemakers in Beijing’s Club Scene