‘Ready to Boogie’ : Pop Music: China Picks Up the Beat

Only two years ago, Chinese authorities sponsored the publication of a booklet called “How to Distinguish Decadent Music,” which admonished millions of people to beware of the dire effects of alien Western sounds.

“Because of the massive use of soft, turbulent and alluring rhythms, one may find one’s body movement will coordinate with the beat against one’s will,” the book warned. It said Western jazz is “against the normal psychological needs of man” and added, “It leads people into an abnormal, demented state of mind.”

Now, in a complete turnabout, China’s top leaders have decided that modern Western music, including disco, ballads, folk music and some rock ‘n’ roll, is to be permitted--even encouraged and, in some cases, required in Chinese society.

Over the last eight months or so, since the demise of the “spiritual pollution” campaign against Western influences, the authorities have gradually opened the way for Chinese people, young and old, to listen and dance to pop music.

Canadian Saxophonist

“This country is ready to dance,” Bill Goede, a Canadian teacher and amateur saxophone player who plays with a Peking rock group, said the other day. “They’re ready to boogie.”

The government has recently encouraged the adoption of many other Western customs in China, though in some instances its advice has been ignored. Hu Yaobang, the Communist Party general secretary, suggested last year that people use knives and forks, but there is no sign that masses of Chinese are discarding their chopsticks.

Western music appears to be taking hold, though, probably because it amounts to official acceptance of the inevitable. Many people in China have been listening to Western music for years on clandestine tape cassettes.

Goede’s band, a collection of Westerners and Africans working here, has just been given official approval to make an unprecedented tour through southern China later this month, playing in sports stadiums and concert halls.

Dancing in Vogue

Meanwhile, millions of Chinese are doing something that many Westerners did in childhood or adolescence--they are taking dancing lessons. Dance classes are not only permitted, but are in some cases made compulsory by the authorities. A Peking office worker reported recently that every member of her work unit is being asked to take time off from work to attend dance lessons sponsored by the Communist Youth League.

As happens so often in China, the dance vogue is developing differently than in the West. At the office dance lessons, it is the older workers who have taken a liking to disco music, which the Chinese call di-si-ke .

“They think it’s good exercise,” one of the younger workers said, “like taiji (shadow-boxing), and that it’s more civilized, because you don’t have to touch each other.”

The younger people, in their 20s and 30s, seem to prefer the waltz and the fox trot.

“We are learning to dance the way your country did in the 1930s and ‘40s,” a young Peking journalist told an American colleague.

Backward though it may be, China’s dance craze has led to something of a Western-style generation conflict. A middle-aged woman complained recently that her daughter, a woman in her early 20s, went to a New Year’s Eve dance party sponsored by her work unit and that “the parents weren’t invited.”

To some extent at least, China’s official interest in popular music represents an attempt to provide an alternative to the music that for years has been flooding in from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Taiwan Singer Wooed

For several months, the rock group that is preparing to tour the country has been playing for foreigners under the name Peking Underground. But when the group appears before Chinese audiences, under the official sponsorship of the Central Philharmonic Society, it will be called the Mainland Band.

So eager is China to grab the leadership in pop music away from Taiwan that in recent weeks, in another startling reversal, the Chinese press has been trying to win the allegiance of Teresa Teng, Taiwan’s most famous singing star, who is known here as Deng Lijun.

A few years ago, the Peking police were arresting young entrepreneurs selling black-market cassettes of Teng’s syrupy love ballads. A newspaper in Tianjin once said that her songs “should be resolutely resisted because they can only impair our physical and mental health and corrupt our revolutionary will.”

Relatives Interviewed

But last month, in an undisguised appeal to Teng’s family loyalties, the Peking newspaper China Youth News published a long article about two elderly and illiterate great-aunts of the singer, ages 83 and 80, who are living in a rural area in Hebei province near Peking, where half the inhabitants are surnamed Deng.

The two women were quoted as saying that the singer’s father, now in Taiwan, grew up in poverty in their village. The village is not so poor now, the newspaper said, yet the Teng house is still standing, unoccupied, because some of the villagers believe that if they leave it undisturbed, the Tengs will some day come home.

A few days later, a reporter for the China Youth News wrote that he had reached Teresa Teng by telephone in Singapore, and had interviewed her--the first interview with her ever published in China. He quoted the singer, who is 33, as saying she was “much encouraged and also very pleased” to hear from someone in Peking.

“To build China well is the common wish of people on both sides of the (Taiwan) strait,” she was quoted as saying.

Hu Urged Tolerance

Taiwan is still several paces ahead of the mainland in the pop music competition. Teng is passe there now, and the pop charts are dominated by new, younger singers such as Lan Xingmei, who sings the Michael Jackson song “Billie Jean” in Chinese.

The first signs of a relaxation in the official Chinese attitude toward Western music and dancing were seen last summer, when dance halls began opening up in many provincial towns.

In November, Hu, the party secretary, who has played the leading role in adopting Western customs, said publicly that he felt China should adopt a more tolerant attitude toward pop music.

“Criticizing pop music without an analytical viewpoint is a manifestation of ignorance that must be targeted for attack,” Hu said in an interview with the weekly magazine Outlook. “Besides, I think it is the people who should make the judgments on a song to see whether it is good or bad.”

Green Light for Rock Concerts

It was in late December that the authorities began to show a willingness to permit Western-style rock concerts in China.

Through most of last fall, the Peking Underground, which includes two musicians from Zaire, two from Madagascar, one from France, one from the United States, one from Canada and a Palestinian, had been playing at parties and dances for foreigners in Peking.

“We played only in a few places, not where any Chinese would be contaminated,” Goede said.

Just before Christmas, the band played for a dance at the Friendship Hotel, where many foreign teachers and advisers are housed. That night, Hong Shaohong, an enterprising young Chinese businessman with ties to the Central Philharmonic Society, heard the band and invited Goede and the others to make a recording at a local studio.

“I thought I should help, or guide, these people to handle things correctly,” Hong said. “In the past, rock ‘n’ roll was regarded in China as decadent music from the West. I thought that label was inappropriate. Comrade Deng Xiaoping (China’s top leader) has said we have to face the future.”

Acting as the band’s Chinese manager and promoter, Hong set up a tour that will include at least 15 concerts in southern China and will culminate in a huge benefit performance in Peking, probably in mid-March at the Capital Sports Stadium, which seats 18,000. Proceeds from the benefit will go to the Chinese Handicapped Welfare Fund. The fund’s most important official is Deng Pufang, the paralyzed son of Deng Xiaoping.

The interest in developing pop music in China is not entirely philanthropic, however.

“They tell us they can ordinarily expect to sell a million cassettes at one yuan each (about 35 cents),” said Shi Fele, a guitar player and one of the Zairians with Peking Underground. “For foreign music, they say they can expect much more than that.”

Profit May Be Huge

With China’s huge population and the increasing amount of money available for consumer goods, the profit could be enormous. It has not been decided how the proceeds from cassettes made by the foreigners’ band will be distributed.

Although the Chinese call the band’s music “disco,” Shi Fele said it is a mixture of rock, reggae and African forms. The lyrics are sung in English, French and Zairian.

There does not appear to be any danger that China will soon move into the avant-garde of Western rock ‘n’ roll.

A Chinese teacher who recently returned from the United States said he felt that punk music was the result of too much freedom. When a Chinese family in Peking was shown a videotape of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” they sat in stunned silence, seemingly unable to believe what they were seeing and hearing.

In fact, Goede said that because of the sudden interest in ballroom dancing among young Chinese, he has been thinking of changing the band’s style, switching back to popular Western music of an earlier era.

“If I had a band here right now that sounded like Glenn Miller, I could go from one end of China to the other,” he said. “We’d be really famous.”