MTV in China

Gregory B. Lee

"Chineseness and MTV:

Construction of the ‘Ethnic’ Imaginary and the Recuperation of National Symbolic Space by the Official Ideology"

Published in Culture and Communication, 1998, 1 (2).

Although performed by a private individual, in other words not a state employee, the text discussed in this paper is an officially sanctioned and broadcast song and video clip. While most independent popular music makers in contemporary China have been consistently excluded from official broadcast media, Gao Feng, a young Chinese singer and musician has been warmly received by the official media. In 1996 he produced a hugely successful (in terms of air time) song and video entitled ‘Da Zhongguo’, ‘Great China’.1 The title may also be translated as ‘Greater China’, a space imagined territorially that would include Taiwan, and disputed areas over which China claims sovereignty. Greater China may also be understood non-territorially, as the framework for a culturally imagined space intended to appeal to overseas Chinese communities. What foregrounds this song in terms of importance and meaning, is that it has been enthusiastically received by the national official broadcast authorities as politically acceptable. The song has also been broadcast on satellite TV, and commercial radio, beyond China’s borders, and in particular in Hong Kong where it has even been covered by local Hong Kong singers.2 But before discussing the song and video in detail, I shall first address the context of the song in terms of the politics and music-culture of the past two decades. In my previous work on Chinese popular music and music television, I discussed non-official musicians whose songs and performances had redeployed or diverted (détourné) ethnic or national ideologies and imaginaries.3 I discussed the Chinese rock and roll singer, now turned jazz musician, Cui Jian whose mockery and defiance of the state and the party center was represented bodily by a people’s army uniform and red kerchief both worn in transgressive and unauthorised ways to emphasise the party’s alienation from the people and its original principles. But there was also a vocal and instrumental unorthodoxy. Cui Jian redeployed the trumpet he'd learnt as a child in the People’s Liberation Army orchestra in deliberately inharmonious ways, and sang in a raucous, guttural Beijing proletarian street accent, in contrast to the mellow undisturbing voice of official and centralized standard Chinese language singers found on state radio and television. I also discussed a group named Panther which has now disbanded. Panther was a more middle-of-the-road rock group which in its video productions aggressively and physically occupied centralized national space, while again musically using a basic rock and roll as a representation of non-official, non-authorised noise against state control over the production and distribution of noise. Then there was the heavy metal band Tang Dynasty whose recuperation of national and ethnic space and history involved both the televisually forceful images Buddhist temples on the desert fringes of the old empire, and the setting of Chinese classical poems to heavy metal rhythms. Tang's main ploy was to foreground the moribund ideology of the PRC state by squeezing it between a recuperation of past Chineseness and heavy metal masculinist Otherness. None of these ever used lyrics overtly to challenge the centre. Rather it was the absence of direct, political content (either in terms of patriotic rhetoric, or the standard official lyric references to ‘socialist’ successes) that was sufficient to foreground the songs as anti-authority. Lyrics in both pre-modern and modern Chinese traditions have always been the target of a close political censorial gaze, and readers are adept at reading between lines. Similarly none of the musical and performative practices would have appeared at all transgressive if the ideology of the state did not privilege an official imaginary in which ethnic authenticity and purity was somehow intended to be inherent in "socialism with Chinese characteristics" as the current mode of capitalist modernization is known in China. While in Europe and America rock music and its surrounding culture is no longer perceived as constituting a real threat to regnant authority, in China it still is. For instance, in early 1996, in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin a concert featuring self-styled punk rocker He Yong earlier this year was permitted by the authorities. However, the usual practices and aura of a concert were not permitted. The police authorities allowed no dancing or standing up, indeed no exuberant behaviour of any sort. Police and security guards employed aggressive and insistent tactics to ensure compliance in the enforcement of their desire to suppress and control the rock concert ethos and its latent dangers for authority.4 I should like now to mention briefly the issues of ethnicity and nationalism in Chinese popular music. There are numerically large ethnic minority communities in China. The Tibetans are the best known outside of China, but officially there are over 80 recognized non-Han Chinese minority groups. Statistically the minorities constitute only 7 per cent of the whole population. However, the 93% supposed Han ethnic majority is not a homogenous group, let alone a ‘race’, a category in any case no longer sustained by scientific analysis. ‘Han’, then, is an unsatisfactory term that refers to the dominant supposedly ‘homogenous’, invented and socially constructed majority, an ‘ethnicity’ referred to outside of China simply as ‘Chinese’. But the ethnic can only be the national when an ethnically ‘authentic’ nation has been constructed, and this the Chinese central authorities have done as convincingly as any modern European state. Once the Han majority becomes represented as (almost) the whole nation, the marginalization of other ‘ethnicities’ as minorities follows as a matter of course, and minorities become, as Engels so bluntly put it, ‘non-historic peoples’ whose destiny is tied to that of powerful ‘ethnically homogenous’ nations. It was against, yet also within, this monolithic discourse of centralized nationalised modernity that 1980s pop musicians were grounded. For even while they challenged the authority of the state, the discourse within which they did so was both national and nationalist, as it was for the students at Tiananmen square in 1989. The nationalist discourse was deployed against the central state authorities who themselves were not only propagators of nationalist ideology, but were also its product. But at least popular music culture, emergent Chinese rock and roll in particular, positioned itself oppositionally with regard to the central authorities. Now, however, that national space, the collective imaginary, the panoply of national symbols, has now been recuperated in turn in favour of the centralized state by the singer Gao Feng, and so as to privilege official ideology. At least in the Tang, Panther and Cui Jian performances one could read a dissatisfaction with central control, a critical stance that represented or exploited popular discontent with economic and social realities. Cui Jian pointed to the new consumerist materialism as one of his specific targets. And more than that there was a resentment against a betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution, and even of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) whose stated aims, if not its real results, were enthusiastically supported by Chinese urban youth in the 1960s. But the oppositional music culture that so dismayed the authorities and that now seems to have been brought under control by the emergence of cultural producers such as Gao Feng, has never been a dominant musical idiom widely available to even the urban population of China. Musically, what followed the Cultural Revolution, that honeymoon period in Sino-American relations of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was an official music policy that permitted only the distribution of folksy, seemingly patriotic melodies and sentiments representing an imaginary homeliness, cosiness and harmony of American life. Such music was consumed eagerly by an audience that had only had access to the narrow and limited repertoire of Cultural Revolution model operatic music and military-style songs. For the regnant authorities, the clean, white, ethnically unproblematic music of singers such as Denver, and the Carpenters, represented the acceptable face of American pop music, an acceptable model for China’s popular music, unlike the ‘miscegenated’, hybrid, ethnically unclear and confused music constituted by rock, soul and blues. The traces of the official policy that favoured such musical models are to be found in the musical and ideological simplicity of the Gao Feng song I discuss here.

The rock and roll that emerged slowly and unofficially throughout the 1980s, was firmly identified with youth and dissidence, with what the authorities called ‘bourgeois spiritual pollution’, which in the official Chinese political lexicon translates as ‘Western influence’. Rock and roll emphasised every social and cultural reality the state was engaged in occluding. Rock music culture foregrounded difference, divisions, Otherness, ideological gaps, and above all it positioned itself against official ideology and authoritarian control. Meanwhile the state broadcast authorities continued to air unsophisticated middle-of-the-road pop products that celebrated national, and ethnic and social unity in a banal and unfashionable style.

At the level of the lyrics, which are very simple, and yet which avoid the directness and over-deployment of patriotic terminology of official song-writing, the intention is to reinscribe and reaffirm the centralizing and totalizing construction of China as a ‘naturally’ cohesive and cohesive nation:


While reinscribing in these lines the Chinese state’s territorial claims, what is privileged here is obviously unity and he monolithic nation. The sub-text alludes to the current incorporation of Hong Kong into the Chinese state, and the official long-term project of recuperating Taiwan, but also to maintaining the internal cohesion of state challenged by minority peoples such as the Tibetans and the Turkic people of the north-west border region, and major socio-economic inequalities across China:

The homeliness of the ‘great big home’, the sense of cogent and willing community, that has survived the trials of history, and the loyalty of the Chinese citizen/subject are all represented here. The ‘inclement weather’ can allude to the specific or the general tribulations of Chinese society over the past two hundred years: the encroachment and exploitation of foreign imperialist powers, the war against the Japanese, the Civil war, the economic disasters of the 1950s and 1960s, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), or more recently the massacre in and around Tiananmen Square that ended the political dissatisfaction and protests of 1989, described as a counter-revolutionary rebellion by the authorities. However, more important than the lyrics, are the visual and musical aspects of Gao Feng’s product which constitute a transformation of style and presentation in its re-presenting of the nationalist and centralizing ideology as positive and seductive. Instead of a cynical and ironic use of national memory and space, Gao Feng produces a music and imagery of celebration. In celebrating the national, the central, the ethnically dominant, the ethnically integrated, in ways that parallel, or derive from, official ideology, with musical and video techniques that previously had been the marker of dissident and marginalized voices, Gao Feng renaturalizes a totalizing national popular imaginary. Rather than recuperate national and ethnic space for alternative visions of society, Gao Feng recuperates it for the nation, or rather for a quasi-official representation of the nation that effectively aims at rallying not the People, but a new urban middle class represented as the nation. At the level of music, Gao Feng’s simple folk-like melody, is accompanied by a heroic chorus. The tune can be listened to by anyone, but the tune is designed to appeal to, to give the impression of accentuating and emulating the 'local', that is in ‘Chinese’ terms, the national and the central. The pentatonic verse provides a constant reminder of the nativist, the 'authentic' with its almost Heidegerrian conflation of national/racial/ethnic 'roots', while accommodating and recuperating the Western, the contemporary, the commercially popular. The chorus alludes to sort of Western folk-rock reminiscent of John Denver. There is also one musical phrase redolent of the revolutionary songs of the Cultural Revolution. The verse is not only pentatonic but folk-like. The folk element of state-sponsored popular song is nothing new of course, neither in China nor elsewhere where state ideologies are dominated and formed by the project of nationalization and modernization. In China, state recuperation of folk song and folk dance date back even before the 1930s revolutionary era of the Yan'an communist guerrilla base; both left and right from the early twentieth-century had attempted to recuperate and deploy the academic yet ‘patriotic’ study and reinvention of the many regional varieties Chinese folk music or rather music. In the 1930s the collection, ordering and rewriting of Chinese folk songs became central to Chinese Communist cultural policy and since the Communist base was situated in north-western China, folk melodies and styles of that region not only became dominant, but thereafter assumed a certain revolutionary aura connected temporally and spatially to the terminus of the mythically important Long March that was Yan’an. In an attempt to synthesize the supposedly typically ‘Western’ with the supposedly typically national ‘Chinese’, in an instantiation of Mao’s formulaic admonition to ‘make the West serve China, and the old serve the new’, the pentatonic verse alludes to a generalized musical folk aura, while the folk-rock chorus provides the aura of the modern and the Western. In the effort to realize a synthesis in which the musical allusions to ‘ethnic authenticity’ are nonetheless not lost, the background, using a typical Western 1980s production, employs drum machines and synthesisers to evoke a convenient conflation of the ethnic and the national which is deliberately pentatonic. A heavy backbeat marking out time helps to bind together these disparate musical (and visual) elements, and a world beat is also invoked in the production of the music in the attempt to produce a cohesive texture. And yet the percussion instruments we hear seem not to be the drums of the drum dancers we see, but a mere minimalist allusion to them. Visually, the folk dance alludes to successful cinematic redeployment of the folk-dance and its characteristic drumbeats in recent Chinese cinematic productions, again drawing on the recuperated local culture that surrounded the 1930s-1940s Yan’an revolutionary base. While this drum dancer sequence could also be read as a token representation of the geographically peripheral, I would rather conclude that the drum dancers of Shaanxi are in fact merely representative of a long-standing historical recuperation of a local peasant cultural practice by the state, by the center. In a sense they represent and symbolise the legitimacy and historical revolutionary credentials of the center, when the Communist fought first the Japanese and then the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi). These drum dancers then are not only folklorized but nationalised, and representative of revolutionary yet centralizing tradition that claims to embody the popular desire for nation, centralized, and cohesive construction of China. The dancers may also be seen as representing a nostalgia for what even the disillusioned and dissident perceive as an innocent national revolutionary moment; Cui Jian has produced cover versions of a number of pre-1949 revolutionary songs. However, that revolutionary moment and its musical and performative representation are now simply commodified. While bells in various musical traditions seem almost always representative of calling communities together, especially in Western musical usage, in many societies the artefacts and the sound stand as tropes of both unity, and authority. In the Chinese case the bells are also visually and musically a marker of history, authenticity and tradition; even more so than the comparatively recent Christian church bell. Bells in China consitute the physical evidence not only of cultural but also of political sophistication stretching back three thousand years; such evidence of civilization and territorial continuity also constitute a trope of legitimacy frequently invoked internally and internationally by the modern Chinese authorities. Bells were important in ancient Chinese state rituals and in the Gao Feng video production the visual mapping onto the sound of bells shots of ancient ritual bells invokes centralized court ceremonies and the illusion of "timeless" national authority.6 But in the cultural product under discussion here, the use of bells have a further significance that I shall mention below. In discussing in detail no more than the eighteen second long opening sequence of the video production, it is possible to deconstruct and elaborate the ideological intent of the whole four-minute visual, lyric and musical production. The bell chimes that open the song and the music video ring out that internationally recognizable tune ‘The East Is Red’. ‘The East is Red’ is not the Chinese national anthem, but is nevertheless probably China's best known tune and song eulogising that national and revolutionary hero, the late Chairman Mao; the first lines of the song are ‘The east is red/The sun has risen/China has produced a Mao Zedong‘. The East is Red’ has the same place in the national imaginary and produces the same patriotic sentimentality as Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in the English imaginary. The song itself has numerous historical connotations, but the chimes version alone is laden with significance. Every Chinese knows that the chimes sound on the hour at the clock tower of Beijing’s main railway station, and thus the chimes also occupy a place in the national imaginary, akin to that of the centralized and nationalizing chimes of Big Ben in London. In a production intended not simply for domestic consumption but also for propagation amongst the overseas Chinese communities, the Chinese diaspora, the musical cliché of ‘The East is Red’ also clearly identifies this particular nationalist patriotic narrative with the Communist PRC version of nationalism, indeed the ambition is to naturalise that version of nationalism, to have all Chinese everywhere accept it. The chimes evoke and represent at once, revolutionary history, and the unity of China assured by and at the centre. The chimes represent also both the beginning of the long narrative of the Chinese nation, and mapped onto that the historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China. This is foregrounded visually by the first shot of ancient Chinese bells in the sunrise; evoking both the birth of the nation and the words of the song ‘The East is Red’. That shot is succeeded by group of children (always represented as the hope of any nation and, of course, always also the excuse for adult suffering while awaiting the nation’s millennium) who walk determinedly forwards, towards the camera, and thus into the future of the nation. This opening shot also constitutes a mimicry of a well-known scene from the photographic record of Mao’s life. The children release doves into the air as a sign of desire for peaceful progress, and hold up lit candles in the dark in a quasi-religious gesture. As the garishly coloured head of a lion dancer twirls across the screen, the soundtrack switches from ‘The East is Red’ into Gao Feng’s melody. The lion dancer represents tradition and Chineseness and constitutes a visual segue into a Western-style popular music mode. Similarly the Chinese women dancers in white robes enacting Buddhist, and thus traditional, beliefs, facilitate the shift to a seemingly less Chinese musical practice; this allusion to Buddhism may also be read as emblematic of the national subject’s, China’s, historical capacity to absorb, naturalise and nationalize external cultures and thought. There are several shots of Peking Opera characters in the first few seconds of the video. Their function is to supply national colour, and the aura of tradition, but their use probably also is linked to the recent successful exploitation of traditional opera in sophisticated made-for-export Chinese Fifth Generation cinema. The Peking Opera woman character (who appears to be in the lead role of a famous patriotic, militaristic Chinese opera Women Generals of the Yang Family) twirls away from the camera in front of Tiananmen and the famous picture of Chairman Mao fixed onto the grand podium that overlooks Tiananmen Square; you will note that ‘tastefully’ we never actually see Tiananmen Square itself, although the camera is shooting from that position. Here again while visually the exoticism of Peking Opera is deployed, there is little or no attempt at a musical representation of the very different, very Other, music of Peking Opera. Indeed there is nothing in fact to fix these actors as representative of Peking Opera rather than any other Chinese opera of which there are many varieties. Peking Opera is one of many local operas, with the distinction that it has been elevated over the centuries into the court, and thus the centralized, national sung drama form. Musically, like the Yanan folk drums, traditional Peking opera music then is indicated musically only by its absence. But then, given that each region has its own opera sung in its own dialect, only the visual can effectively represent a national image. Aurally, then there is only a lack of specific musical references, so that while the rapid visual changes overlap with the musical continuity in this production, the visual allusions to traditional music culture nevertheless digress from and even oppose the music that would normally be commensurate with the images.

Cutting to the next frame of the video, four or five middle aged couples are shown running into each other’s embrace against the backdrop of the red PRC flag which fills the screen entirely. The camera pans out to reveal those embracing as members of various ethnic minorities, known in China as ‘minority nationalities’. The first shot of singer-performer Gao Feng shows him in classic Mao pose, overcoat flapping, one hand held high in emulation of the well-known Chairman’s greeting. Representations of Mao had been previously been used to protest against the political order, and remind the authorities of the revolutionary idealism on which the state was founded; it is a clever détournement of an iconography to which the authorities could hardly object. But here we see Gao Feng striking well-known Chairman Mao poses, long etched into the popular imaginary, not to critique contemporary authority but rather to affirm and celebrate it. We had seen during the Cultural Revolution Mao as pop idol, now we see pop idol as Mao. Against a dark background the spotlight sweeps across Mao/Gao Feng to reveal him now on a studio concert stage. The audience includes children and again national minority members who in this video are always represented as smiling, seemingly contented women dressed in attractive colourful costumes, imagined as "feminized", innocent, harmless markers of their difference that accord with the official ideology’s construction and representation of non-Han minorities, and incidentally supply supplemental, peripheral colour. But here, not just the minorities and children smile, all the audience smile, all sway in time with the music, hands in the air in a gesture of responsive salutation, and almost religious exaltation as they sing along with Gao Feng’s patriotic celebratory song. Space, history and multitudes have been repeatedly employed in Communist China to reinforce national pride and to establish national authority and to invigorate the nostalgic dream of a national return to a Chinese golden age of political and military supremacy. As the Chinese saying that forms part of the popular discursive negotiation of everyday life has it: lishi chang, difang da, ren duo (‘history is long, the place is big, and people are numerous’). Each of these three elements of common-sense ideology is alluded to here both visually and musically. The chorus and crowds of children and concert spectators imply multitude, while the bells imply both length of history and providing a sense of aural space. Ultimately, this music video production constitutes a successful attempt to recuperate national iconography, to reinscribe and reaffirm the associations of party with nation, of an integrated people inclusive of yet beyond minorities, in which the image of a dominant Han majority at the centre metonymically represents the entirety of Chinese society.

‘They must be represented’ wrote Marx, and yet in this production where are the workers, the peasants, where indeed is the rest of China? Where are those who are Other to China’s consumer and industrialized capitalist cities? Indeed, metaphor of difference, spatial tropes of marginalization, of centre and periphery may be less suitable to the representation of the socio-economic reality than more traditional, established hierarchical models. Where in this video of celebration are those relegated to the lower echelons of the socio-economic hierarchy, where is the representation of the reality of beggars and prostitution, and what of the so-called floating population of 100 million plus unemployed (twice the population of France or ten times the population of Portugal), those constantly dependent on the arbitrary regulation of the economy by the global market, state planners and local implementers?

Gao Feng’s song and its televisual presentation constitute a response to a fear of national fragmentation. The yawning inequalities that daily fragment and threaten the integrity of the Chinese nation-state, the daily peasant uprisings happening somewhere and everywhere in rural China, even more than local or ethnic difference, are well concealed beneath this mask of national centralized well-being represented in this video. And yet the social fragmentation and increasing economic inequality is not of an order than can be negotiated or contained within national boundaries. As Étienne Balibar recently noted:

At a stage in world history when populations are "at one and the same time completely atomised and yet irreversibly mixed", the language of alterity becomes increasingly inadequate.8

Thus it is not a critique focussed on the exclusion and marginalization of the ethnic Other that will suffice to counter discursive strategies such as we see and hear deployed by Gao Feng. Rather what is required is a response framed by the real universality which marks this historical stage in which "for the first time, humanity is not simply an ideal, a utopian notion, but has become the condition of existence of human beings themselves…a condition that coincides with the generalisation of conflicts and of exclusions."9

Ultimately, Gao Feng’s production eulogises not simply a nationalist ideology, but also a new economic order whose beneficiaries however can only ever be a minority of the people’s existing within China’s border. But this economic expansion "abolishes neither political domination nor economic inequalities", and on the contrary is part of an unprecedented stage of "polarisation of wealth and misery, of power and powerlessness".10 While Gao Feng’s product may have served to bolster the ideological underpinning of the relatively wealthy and powerful, a little satisfaction may be taken from the fact that the miserable and powerless have not had to endure it.

1 Lyrics and music by Gao Feng; performed by Gao Feng; video directed by Zhao Lei; cinematography by Feng Yan; art work by Shu Gang. All translations mine.
2 Both the song and video were produced in 1995 and broadcast widely and frequently during 1996 on Chinese state television, and by the independent Hong Kong- based satellite television company Star Television whose footprint covers most of the Chinese-speaking areas of the Asia-pacific region. the song has also been broadcast on Hong Kong commercial radio. the song has also been covered on Hong Kong radio and Hong Kong terrestrial television variety shows.
3 "'The East is Red' Goes Pop: Commodification, hybridity and nationalism in Chinese popular song and its televisual performance", in Popular Music [Cambridge University Press] 14, 1 (January 1995), and Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism and Hybridity in China and Its Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press; London: C. Hurst & Co. 1996.)
4 As evidence by CNN un-edited footage of which the author has a video copy.
5 The word I translate here as home (jia) also means family in Chinese, thus facilitating the slide into representation of all Chinese as brothers and sisters is facilitated; the Chinese word for the nation, or country is guojia, the element guo meaning ‘state’.
6 A comprehensive study of chime bells and their importance to the feudal Chinese state is to be found in Lothar Von Falkenhausen, Suspended Music: Chime-Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
7 Étienne Balibar, La crainte des masses: Politique et Philosophie avant et après Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1997) 429-430. All translations mine.
8 Balibar 430.
9 Balibar 430.
10 Balibar 425.