ABSTRACT
In the nearly five years that have elapsed since the crackdown the politics of popular music have changed in ways that throw fascinating and complex light on the current political situation in China. The popularity of rock music outside of its subcultural milieu has been inextricably linked with a larger youth culture centered around college campuses and the urban private sector. Rock music, although it remains on the margins of state-sanctioned culture, can no longer be characterized as an unambiguously counterhegemonic form. The Tiananmen movement marked a major turning point in the development of rock music in China. This chapter presents a song that in many ways provides a complex summation of the politics of popular music in post-Tiananmen China. The emergence of a rock music subculture in China is a relatively recent phenomenon. The extent to which commerce and nativism are intertwined in the work of Tang Dynasty is emblematic of the politics of China's increasingly market-driven, export-oriented economy.
