China Wind Music: Constructing an Imagined Cultural China

Abstract

This dissertation explores constructions of Chineseness in China Wind music, a trend that emerged in the 2000s in Chinese popular music. China Wind music typically references traditional Chinese culture and incorporates Chinese instruments into global pop genres, such as hip hop, R&B, rock, and ballad. The trend was popularized by artists based in Taiwan but also includes those from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, and Singapore. China Wind music’s seemingly pro-China messages belie the diverse political and cultural realities of Chinese-speaking artists and consumers residing in different regions. To better understand the complex relationship that China Wind artists and consumers have with Chinese identity, culture, and politics, I suggest that China Wind artists are acting as cultural nationalists who construct “an imagined cultural China” based on a supposedly shared culture and history. The three approaches to analyzing China Wind music employed in this thesis are: examining the musical construction of Chineseness in China Wind songs through the use of pentatonicism and musical borrowing, surveying the social meanings of instruments (e.g. erhu, pipa) and their deployment in China Wind music, and analyzing the relationship between the song and visual narratives in China Wind music videos and their remediation of Beijing opera, calligraphy, and martial arts. These analyses reveal how China Wind music incorporates a mix of living traditions and invented traditions (Hobsbawm 1983) to evoke an ambiguous “ancient” Chineseness that fosters a sense of belonging and connects audiences from various locales to an imagined cultural China.