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Underground Rock Music in Inland Chinese Cities: An Ethnographic Study of the Music and Ideology of the Developing Zhengzhou Rock Music Scene, 2000-2023
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- Author / Creator
- Li, Sitong
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Rock music, a Western-originated popular music genre, has existed in mainland China for almost forty years. Emerging in Beijing during the tumultuous and rapidly changing social, political, and economic landscape of the 1980s, Chinese rock music voiced younger generations’ concerns about the future of China and expressed subversive perspectives that some echoed with the student movement. Over successive generations, as China underwent significant social, cultural, and economic developments, rock music gained wider acceptance and a growing commercial market in the mainland and beyond. Meanwhile, Chinese youths have developed rock music in various ways that both confirmed and deviated from the original meanings and functions of rock music in the 1980s. This paper investigates these changes from the perspective of the underground rock music scene in the inland Chinese city of Zhengzhou. Through interview-based ethnographic research of Zhengzhou rock musicians, this study aims to understand how an underground rock music movement emerged and rapidly developed a thriving scene, as a part of an underground rock music network among different inland cities, in about twenty years. In particular, this paper hopes to uncover how the original ideologies of 1980s Beijing rock musicians were maintained or changed by Zhengzhou rock musicians and shaped their decisions in the formation and development of the underground rock music scene in Zhengzhou. This study seeks to provide new perspectives on the evolution of Chinese rock music outside of China’s large coastal cities, as a way to broaden the understanding of the different methods and modes of adoption and assimilation of rock music into Chinese-speaking East Asia.
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2023
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Arts
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.