ABSTRACT
Since the late 1970s the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has experienced significant social transformation, including the move to a free market economy and the country’s opening up again to the outside world, which have led to the resurgence of social and cultural diversity. In the meantime, the new ideologies, technologies, and economic mode have brought about the institutionalization and commodification of a so-called “Chinese culture” as part of the recent Chinese nation-state’s construction with the intention of establishing a “modern state” in the era of globalization, including the commodification of Rock music in China. Generally speaking, similar to other forms of art and cultural production in China nowadays, Rock also engaged in a complex and creative relationship with the China’s shift towards a free-trading economic structure under totalitarian management by a State bureaucracy. Without any claim to exhaustiveness, this chapter discusses three specific performance scenes in the history of Chinese Rock music. I will argue that these scenes happened in different symbolic spaces and do not only illustrate the commodified shifting spirit in the field of Rock music in China from the late 1980s to the 2000s, but also echo the Chinese social transformation in the 1990s toward a consumerist society.
