ABSTRACT
My very first experience with karaoke was in Mei-jie, a small, semirural town in the Pearl River delta of Guangdong province in south China, in the spring of 1992 as I was conducting my research on Taiwanese manufacturing investment in south China.2 In Mei-jie alone, a town of fifty thousand people, there were one karaoke bar, five Taiwanesestyle karaoke restaurants, and more than four hundred Taiwanese shoe factories. In the midst of expressive songs about lost love and drifting lives, sung through loudspeakers and under swirling lights, accompanied by seafood and beer, I succeeded in making connections with representatives of investing companies and local officials for interviews, just as Taiwanese investors made contact with local Chinese officials.
