China’s Underground Rock Bands: a Hard Day’s Night

Officially, the Black Leopards don’t exist, yet when the four young Chinese rock musicians stepped on stage one evening, the audience went wild.

Chinese youngsters, usually restrained in public, danced on their chairs and sang along with the band. Afterward, girls mobbed the musicians for autographs.

“Most young Beijing people really like rock. It’s stimulating,” said the Black Leopards’ lead guitarist, Li Tong.

That’s just the problem. The communist government thinks no good can come of that kind of stimulation. It refuses to register Beijing’s approximately two dozen rock bands or permit their music on radio or television.

Most recording companies won’t touch their songs, which means ambitious groups must seek out studios in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Worst of all, from the rockers’ point of view, it is illegal for them to put on a commercial concert.

“Without registering, you can’t get ‘permission papers,’ and without permission papers you have no right to perform,” said Xu Tian, a 30-year-old rock impresario who makes a living helping bands evade the rules. “So we are, in a sense, underground.”

Other kinds of music groups register with the local culture bureau, which censors both music and lyrics.

As for rock, China’s octogenarian leaders long ago decided it is “bewildering and impetuous,” and that listening to it leads to “excessive drinking, drug-taking, gang fights and homosexuality.”

Rock bands that have sprung up in Beijing and other major cities in the last five or six years are not banned, but the authorities make their life difficult.

“This ticket took a lot of erudition,” Xu said, laughing as he displayed a pale yellow ticket to a Black Leopards concert. It was marked “invitation,” did not mention the price (15 yuan, or $2.75) and named a cultural exchange organization as the sponsor.

Most concerts are disguised as private parties or “modern music exhibitions,” he said, or they take place in a restaurant or hotel authorized to have regular entertainment. Fans, often the same few hundred people, learn about rock performances by word of mouth.

Sometimes, unofficial police approval is won ahead of time over a meal or through a personal contact, but it’s not unusual for police to learn of a performance at the last minute and shut it down.

Bands often pay the restaurants and hotels where they play, not the other way around.

“Money is a big problem,” said Xiao Yiping, a guitarist whose group, Evening News, recently split up for financial reasons.

So is police harassment. Police in Dalian, in northeastern China, chopped off Xiao’s shoulder-length hair after he played in a bar there in 1990.

Xiao, 21, now wears his hair conventionally short, but police still view him with suspicion because he has no danwei , or work unit, responsible for him. They consider him a vagrant and have hauled him in several times to tell him so.

Parents also urge the rockers to get real jobs. “The pressure starts from the minute I get up,” moaned Ta Le, 18, a cooking-school dropout who was the Evening News vocalist.

Ta and many of Beijing’s other rockers are self-taught. They hand around the latest Western cassette tapes, borrowed from foreign friends, and share guitar chord books.

Xiao tried to copy Janis Joplin’s fingering from a video called “Great Guitar Licks,” passed on by Li of the Black Leopards.

Some rockers self-consciously adopt the stereotypical Western rock-star style: late nights, groupie girlfriends and leather jackets. Ta wears a small silver ring in his left ear lobe.

Their songs are seldom political, but convey youthful restlessness, alienation and a casual view of love the government considers anti-socialist.

“It’s hard for me to leave, it’s hard for me to live, it’s hard for me to go on honestly,” sings Cui Jian, China’s most popular rocker and the only one who has been allowed to record in China.

Cui also has more concerts shut down by police than other rockers because of his prominence.

“We’d like to legalize,” Li said. “That would give us an opportunity to perform more and allow more people to hear us.”

“If we become legal,” Xu said, “we’ll pay tax.”

Fans say even the few performances fill a need.

When Cui took the stage in a hotel late last year, a young woman kicked off her shoes and said, “I like him because he makes me bounce!”