Index
1. Regeneration of the Popular Music Scene in China during the 1980s
2. General perceptions of Canto-pop
3. Governmental perception
4. Canto-pop in Singapore

1. Regeneration of the Popular Music Scene in China during the 1980s

Modern popular music in China can be traced back to the Twenties in connection with the increasing Westernization and commercialization of Shanghai. Since then, music in China has developed along distinctive lines. The concept of ‘popular song’ was associated from the first with the contemporary European-American urban leisure culture of nightclubs, cabarets and dance music. ‘Popular songs’ were in general sung in moderate tempo and often accompanied in a jazz style, but their soft and legato melodic tunes occasionally ‘betray’ a local flavour. However, in the growing revolutionary patriotic circles, especially after the Japanese invasion in the Thirties, this kind of music was considered unsuitable since it was held to weaken the people’s will to fight the enemy and readiness for sacrifice. As a result, the so-called ‘mass songs’, which were closely associated with Communist revolutionary culture, appeared, and the attractiveness of ‘popular songs’ began to decline, even among the Bourgeoisie.

Many songs for the masses during the revolutionary period in China were created for the specific purpose of being sung at political rallies [1]. As one can imagine, such music were meant to familiarise the masses with Communist (after 1949, government) policies and to urge them towards support for the implementation of these policies. The messages of these songs could, for instance, comprise praise of the leadership, announce major policy decisions, criticise ‘deviations’, or assert China’s determination to reunite Taiwan with the motherland. Mass songs were normally sung without instruments. The concept of functional harmony and chord progression was seen as alien to the Chinese populace at that time.

From a musical perspective, these songs were characterized by simple, short tunes of between six and eight phrases. Most particularly, they were widely employed to stir up militant and heroic feelings during especially ‘revolutionary’ phases, especially during the Cultural Revolution in the Sixties and Seventies. Subsequently, the rise of Deng, Xiao Ping to power in the late 1970s and the series of reforms that he initiated, which increased the emphasis on economic development and modernization and inaugurated a gradual move to a market economy, combined with the gradual opening up of China to the outside world, marked the beginning of a fundamentally new era in Chinese history. Against this changed background popular music in China became radically transformed.

The immediate consequence of the Open Door Policy initiated in 1978 was the introduction of more normal commercial relations with the outside world, from which various foreign cultural products such as films and music were allowed to be imported, subject to government control. The earliest foreign music to penetrate and became famous in China in the Eighties came from a Taiwan-origin-Hong Kong based female singer, Deng, Li Jun. Deng’s sweet, soft, gentle vibratos, coquettish slides and slightly nasal vocal style was the complete opposite of what people on the mainland had been singing and hearing in the revolutionary decades. Not surprisingly, the lyrics of her songs were not about Chairman Mao or government policies but were mostly the expression of individual feelings, such as romantic love between a man and a woman. Such themes had in fact been absent from the music scene on mainland China for decades.

On the other hand, the Chinese rock scene took off when Cui, Jian, a trained classical musician in the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, was being introduced to the Anglo-American rock during the mid-1980s. As a trumpeter-cum-singer, his protest-rock style became well known to the worldwide media during the democracy movement in 1989. However, because of his provocative actions on stage, such as blindfolding his eyes with red cloth, which was taken to represent criticism of Communism and a challenge to the authorities, a national tour by his band was forced to be cancelled.

By observers of the Chinese music scene Cui is regarded as the ‘grandfather’ of Chinese Rock ‘n’ Roll [2].  Although other rock bands were formed in later years, such as Tang Chao, Cobra and Heibao, all were denied access to state-controlled broadcasting media. Until quite recently, even though the rock scene in China has given rise to much discussion in academic forums, rock music has enjoyed a rather low profile in China and has never made any breakthrough into international markets. This contrasts very strongly with the high profile and general public approval of Canto-pop, as cultivated in Hong Kong during the same period.



2. General perceptions of Canto-pop

Canto-pop has once been characterized as ‘No sex. No drugs. Maybe a little rock ‘n’ roll’ [3]. However, defining Canto-pop’s musical style seems rather difficult, since it is a fact that while many songs can be described as ‘easy listening’ [4], ‘soft rock’ [5], or ‘pop ballad’ [6] , others cannot: some of the most popular singers and bands make a sound describable as fast and loud.

Nevertheless, one predominant characteristic is that singer’s voice is mixed so as to ‘stand out from’ the instruments, ensuring that the text is (almost always) clearly projected and heard [7].  Another valid general observation would be that Canto-pop is very much ‘middle-of-the-road’. This narrow stylistic ‘register’ of Canto-pop might legitimately be taken as a reflection of the homogeneity of life-style and outlook of the general population [8].  But the low level of internal differentiation observable in Canto-pop in general can be regarded, alternatively, as a ‘badge’ of local identity for Hong Kong people: its stylistic homogeneity guarantees the genre’s desired emblematic quality. While fitting lyrics to a pre-composed melody is the standard practice employed from the beginning to create original Canto-pop songs, this sequence of actions turns out also to be very useful for the production of cover versions.

In the context of lyrics in the 1980s, or more precisely before the 1989 ‘incident’ (in Beijing), Canto-pop lyrics were in general amorous in content, though philosophical and cultural themes may also be found. Hong Kong musicians were not used to including political reference in Canto-pop, and Hong Kong popular songs rarely commented explicitly on politics [9]. After the emergence of the June Fourth Movement in 1989, however, a short-lived vogue for politically related Canto-pop songs arose, responding to widespread feelings of patriotic fervour and political idealism (as well as to commercial awareness of their topicality) [10]. 



3. Governmental perception

Unlike some countries such as Korea and China, where state control of the media were relatively tight, the colonial Hong Kong government exercised a laissez-faire policy with regard to popular cultural industries. Because of this lack of direct government supervision and/or intervention, most sectors of the Hong Kong economy were subject before 1997 to the ‘self-regulation’ typical of classic market economies [11]. J. T. Lee, programme director of RTHK (Radio 2), claimed that there was minimal, or even zero, government intervention in radio broadcasting [12]. Jolland Chan, vice Chairman of Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong (CASH), stated similarly that no governmental restrictions whatever were imposed on Canto-pop composition [13].

However, such broadcasting freedom is not tolerated in the Chinese motherland. A good example illustrating this is the title song of Mui’s Canto-pop album Bad Girl, released in 1985. A cover version of the British Eighties sassy pop singer, Sheena Easton’s ‘Strut’, Bad Girl is one of the main promotional songs of the album. The most atypical feature (for Canto-pop) of this song is the content of its lyrics, which refer to sexual transgression in such phrases as ‘Why, why, tell me why, does taboo dissolve at night?’, ‘An innocent girl also wants to become bad’ and ‘I secretly blame myself for being bad tonight’.

By Western standards, the content of the song is perhaps nothing special at all. In Hong Kong, although Canto-pop songs treating sexual defiance with such openness were basically unheard of before this period, the album Bad Girl could still achieve popular success and remain on the air waves in the Hong Kong of 1985. In mainland China, on the other hand, Bad Girl has from the start been specifically proscribed whenever Anita has toured there. In 1995, when Mui deliberately sang this song as an encore in a concert in Guangzhou in China, the remainder of her tour was cancelled forthwith [14].

Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, Canto-pop only very rarely associates itself with political commentary. It had never taken up any definable political posture before the rise of the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989. However, when patriotic fervour overtook Hong Kong, a wave of pro-democracy Canto-pop began. The recording of the Canto-pop song 'All for Freedom', sung by a galaxy of Canto-pop stars [15], was its landmark event. There was also a fund-raising concert held in Hong Kong in 1989, whose aim was to raise money to buy supplies for the Tiananmen hunger strikers and to assist some strike leaders to escape from China.

By late 1989, Canto-pop songs dealing with Hong Kong’s political future were starting to emerge, provoked by the Tiananmen events. Surprisingly, in contrast to the consistently negative attitude shown towards Hong Kong’s pro-democracy politicians (Martin Lee, for instance), Chinese government officials invited the Hong Kong entertainment community to have an official conversation about the issues. Ultimately, Mui was invited to perform in Beijing in 1993, at a time when the pro-democracy song All for Freedom (and, for different reasons, her Bad Girl) were still banned on the Chinese mainland. This courting of the entertainment industry in Hong Kong at this critical time shows how important the Chinese officials considered its opinion-forming role to be.



4. Canto-pop in Singapore

The spread of Canto-pop has been so wide and rapid to the growing overseas Chinese population that one writer has likened it to a place as small as Rhode Island with a population equivalent to that of North Carolina supplying music for the entire USA [16]. Since the estimated number of Cantonese speakers world-wide runs to about 70 million, concentrated in economic metropolis such as Hong Kong, Vancouver, London and Singapore [17], Cantonese ranks as a major dialect of Chinese. Hence the rise of Canto-pop in the Cantonese-speaking diaspora overseas could not pass unnoticed by observers of the cultural scene.

The cultivation of Cantonese music in Singapore can be traced back to the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 1179–1911), when Cantonese opera was popular [18]. Although Cantonese operas were banned during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) on account of their supposedly subversive themes, they revived after the end of the monarchy. With the large-scale exodus of cultural talent and capital from China to Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian countries in the period immediately following the Second World War, these places of emigration obtained the means, cultural and economic, to develop their entertainment industries on a local basis. Conversely, the involvement of the PRC in the Korean War and its general support for revolutionary organizations in the Third World tended to alienate overseas Chinese from their Chinese motherland.

During the 1950s and 1960s, when Singapore was newly decolonized, she started to search for a more independent national identity. Subsequent to the break-away of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965, the state launched a ‘bilingual’ language policy of promoting proficiency in both English (for everyone) and the relevant one among the three official ‘mother tongues’ belonging to the Chinese, Malay and Indian ethnic groups.

By the 1970s, the widespread use of competing, non-official dialects, especially within the Chinese community, was held to be responsible for a lack of progress in the implementation of the ‘bilingual’ language policy in the school population. As a result, the Singapore government introduced a ‘Speak Mandarin Campaign’ in 1979 in order actively to discourage the use of other Chinese dialects in the public arena [19]. Slogans such as ‘If you are a Chinese, talk in Mandarin’ summed up the campaign. This explains why music set to Cantonese lyrics was not able to develop normally in Singapore, even though 75 per cent of its citizens were ethnic Chinese, and Cantonese ranked third among the Chinese dialects spoken (after those of Teochew and Hokkien) [20].

This state-sponsored ‘Speak Mandarin Campaign’ subsequently led to the removal of all Cantonese programmes from television and radio stations. Cantonese soap operas and their Cantonese theme songs had been phased out by 1981. Instead, these programmes were dubbed into Mandarin and their theme songs replaced by Mandarin tracks. A more aggressive measure that followed was the discontinuation of broadcasts of Hong Kong soap operas and theme songs (even when dubbed into Mandarin) on Singapore’s local Mandarin television station. Canto-pop and all other dialectal music programmes were simply taken off the airwaves [21].

Since the 1980s, Canto-pop has rarely been aired in major shopping malls and at public events. Since the pro-Mandarin Campaign in Singapore coincided with the rise of Canto-pop in Hong Kong, it was only to be expected that the state-controlled media in Singapore would do their best to resist the new genre.

When, later in the 1990s, the Singapore government softened its hard-line attitude towards the broadcasting of dialectal programmes, Cantonese-language programmes were readmitted to the public media and the situation normalized. By then, however, the intensity of the cultivation of Canto-pop had brought the genre in Hong Kong and Singapore alike to a point of saturation where the introduction of new ideas and styles was vital to its future. What is exciting is that during the Nineties Hong Kong, Singapore and some other Asian countries with Cantonese-speaking populations began a process of cultural cross-fertilization bringing together different genres of East Asian popular music.


This edited version of a part of Ivy Man's thesis entitled 'Three Decades of Canto-pop: Hybridization, consolidation and Innovation' is published on freemuse.org with permission from the author.

About the author

Ivy Man is currently teaching music and cultural studies courses in the University of Hong Kong and City University of Hong Kong respectively. Her research interests include the music and cultural studies of Hong Kong, China and Southeast Asia.
She graduated with an M.Phil in music and culture and was a Swire Scholar and Rayson Huang Music Scholarship holder at the University of Hong Kong before completing her Ph.D. at the University of Liverpool in United Kingdom.