For the most part, Americans who are familiar with Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese–language pop music) condemn it as vapid, uninspired, and somewhat painful to listen to. Yet by and large, people making these judgments either lack the linguistic skills to understand the sophisticated poetics of the lyrics or have not taken the time to do so. Mandopop has surprisingly complex cultural implications for such a seemingly superficial genre. It has introduced new gender roles to China, created a vocabulary to express individualism in direct contrast to state and Confucian prioritization of the group, and has introduced transnational culture to a...

This chapter will trace China’s musical history, beginning with Shanghai’s jazz era in the first half of the twentieth century to contemporary PRC music. I will also examine the effects of Gang-Tai pop (Hong Kong and Taiwan pop) on the PRC’s musical and cultural ethos, concluding with an exploration of the gendered identities that this music has exported to the PRC.

Western music accompanied Christian missionaries’ arrival in China beginning in 1601, when Matteo Ricci brought a harpsichord to China and trained eunuchs to perform Chinese songs to please the imperial court.¹ This expanded in the early 1800s, when American...

On September 9, 2003, I was in Taipei, Taiwan, at Eslite,¹ an upscale twenty-four-hour coffee shop and bookstore, taking a break from the trials and tribulations of fieldwork. As a diversion, I purchased the Chinese translation ofMemoirs of a Geisha²—a fictional autobiography of a Japanese geisha written by a Caucasian male from the United States. On the way home, I walked along Zhong Xiao East Road, one of the most fashionable shopping districts in Taiwan, and then through some back alleys behind the Japanese department store Sogo. My fellow pedestrians included affluent Chinese youth flaunting the latest fashions,...

In spite of the dramatic political liberalization of PRC and Taiwan, their economic growth, and the unprecedented freedom that youth enjoy, there seems to be an increasing sense of loneliness and anomie in both the PRC and Taiwan. Yet emotions such as loneliness, sorrow, and heartbreak are difficult to express in Chinese and Taiwanese cultures, which idealize stoic endurance and emphasize indirectness as a means to maintaining social harmony. In the following pages I will present interviews that demonstrate the ways in which Mandopop songs become a conduit through which people in China and Taiwan can come to understandings of,...

As we saw in the previous chapter, both Mandopop lyrics and the people I interviewed demonstrate that the expression of loneliness and isolation in urban China and Taiwan is in many ways a highly gendered experience. In this chapter I shift the focus from Mandopop’s articulation of women’s lives to the ways in which female identities are constructed.

Mandopop is usually a cooperative venture with one person composing the melody, another writing the lyrics, and a third singing the songs. Men also frequently write songs for other male performers, yet though many of the most popular performers are women, the...

An essential component of the Mandopop industry’s bid for success is the degree to which it can create viable images of ideal women and men with love songs that audiences can relate to. The previous chapter addressed constructions of women’s identities in such songs and the ways in which Taiwan’s pop has helped to redefine femininity as paradoxically both more traditional in its personality schema and more modern in its transnationalism. As I noted in chapter 2, though women’s roles are shifting toward the Taiwan model, masculine identities have become a far more contested domain in the PRC. In part...

In the following pages I will examine the cultural biases embedded in critiques of Mandopop. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan’s popular music swept across China. Many in the PRC government reacted to the values embedded in Taiwan’s lyrics with mistrust and disdain, expressing a fear that Taiwan and Hong Kong’s cultural incursion would result in the PRC’s loss of national identity. On the other side of the strait, people in Taiwan complained of Mandopop’s fast pace and changing nature and linked this to similar trends in Taiwan’s society. More recently, several of Taiwan’s scholars have critiqued Mandopop for...