Geography of Chinese rock and roll: cultural, political and economic forces intertwined

This chapter mines the literature to bring out the richness and heterogeneity of Chinese rock. The first part charts the geography of music as the intersection of situated material space and networked topology, the encounters of which are enacted by, and in return reshape, political, economic and cultural forces. The construction of Chinese rock as a liberal voice in authoritarian China has put it into a continuous struggle with three missions: counter political surveillance, counter capitalist-driven consumerism and counter westernization. Chinese rock thus assembles disparate elements from the two wests: the music style of rock and roll as subversive force in the capitalist-west and, ‘northwestern folk influence’ (xibeifeng) of the western China that imagines a cosmopolitan culture of the silk roads. The second part addresses the live rock scenes (live house and festivals) that has mushroomed in cities, some as forces of dissenters that attempt to construct small commons in cities encroached by neoliberalism, some as state-sanctioned role models to propagate alternative music as new economy and as new city images, or more frequently, as a hybrid form of both.