Excerpts from the forthcoming book by Dennis Rea Zhang Xing Next section | Nunatak Home Page One overcast January afternoon my teenage acquaintance Xiao Fei turned up at my door with a longhaired fellow named Chu Fei, who played drums for the Beijing rock group Yinhuochong (“Firefly Band”). The band was on tour backing up China's original rock star, Zhang Xing, and was scheduled to play two concerts in Chengdu that week. Xiao Fei had met Chu Fei years earlier in Beijing and evidently wanted to score some points by showing off the American guitarist to his rocker friend. With his retro Mao cap and Artful Dodger insouciance, Xiao Fei typified a new generation of hip Chinese youths who had traded in the Little Red Book for rock and roll. He was my earliest link to the "Chinarock" scene then emerging in Beijing, and by introducing me to Zhang Xing and the music of Chinese rock legend Cui Jian, he unwittingly set in motion a series of events that would have life-changing consequences for me and for others. At Xiao Fei's urging I gave Chu Fei an impromptu guitar recital in my apartment. After a few pieces the grinning drummer insisted that I accompany him to the Tibet Hotel to play for Zhang Xing and the rest of the band. What the hell, I thought, this ought to be interesting. So I grabbed my coat and guitar and walked out to the Ring Road with the two young men to flag down a taxi. Zhang Xing was quite the dandy with his impeccably tailored suit, slicked-back hair, and stylish dark glasses. (The sunglasses were a Zhang Xing trademark; he rarely removed them, even indoors or after dark.) He carried himself with the superior air of a Hong Kong sophisticate and delighted in displaying his wealth, conspicuously brandishing an inch-thick wad of U.S., Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese currency. He thought nothing of spending on lunch what most families earned in a month, and his entourage always included a retinue of stunning young ladies. It was no wonder the government considered him a bad element. The future father of Chinese rock first took up the guitar as a teen in his native Shanghai at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, a time when anti-foreign sentiment was running high and the guitar was still condemned as a Trojan Horse carrying a deadly cultural contagion—which of course it proved to be. Zhang Xing's flirtation with Western pop music didn't sit well with the local culture cops, and he claims that the police confiscated and destroyed several of his guitars over the years. When China's cultural climate thawed somewhat under the relatively progressive leadership of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, the government relaxed control over artistic expression, within limits. Creative impulses that were stifled during the Cultural Revolution found vent in confessional "wound literature," the cinema of China's so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers, the experimental music of academic "New Tide" composers, and Western-influenced popular music. It was around this time that the tongsu (“mass music”) industry arose to fill the emotional void left by the Cultural Revolution and its monotonous, sexless paeans to Chairman Mao, socialism, and the motherland. The tongsu craze, which dominates the Chinese popular music market to this day, was catalyzed by the chart-topping hits of charismatic Taiwanese songstress Deng Lijun ("Teresa Teng"), whose girlish bubblegum love songs fell like rain on an emotionally parched Chinese populace. Soon singers in the mold of Deng Lijun were all the rage in China, flooding the airwaves and playing sellout concerts in huge arenas from Guiyang to Harbin. But the tongsu star's glamorous public image belied a life of virtual servitude to Party officials who supervised every last detail of a singer's repertoire, lyrics, and performance style. Though state censors generally tolerated softcore love songs, mild social criticism, and even lighthearted parodies of Cultural Revolution–era anthems, tongsu essentially remained true to its prescribed function as music for "the people." That is, until the libidinous Zhang Xing exploded onto the scene. In the early 1980s a young Zhang Xing sang and played guitar on a Shanghai TV talent show and won first prize for his erotically charged performance. In the next few days thousands of guitars were sold in the Shanghai metropolitan area. The young sensation soon attained national fame and made a number of guitar-driven commercial hits such as "The Green Plains" and "Ashi," securing his place as Mainland China's first home-grown rock icon. By the end of the decade he had sold more records than any musician in Chinese history. By anything-goes Western standards, Zhang Xing's repertoire of revved-up Taiwan and Hong Kong pop ballads was laughably tame, but his swoony love songs provided the ultimate in titillation to a public bored with bland socialist entertainment. And he was in fact an excellent singer, possessed of an artfully nuanced, caressing voice that I found genuinely moving. Before long he became the most commercially successful entertainer in China, earning upwards of 5,000 renminbi per concert, or roughly 50 times the monthly income of the average Chinese citizen in the 1980s. A charter member of China's neo-capitalist stratosphere, Zhang Xing's hubris eventually proved to be his undoing. Giddy with celebrity, he affected a flamboyant lifestyle and flaunted his profligate sexual relationships, becoming something of a tabloid character in the public eye and earning the disapproval of a regime that viewed him as an unwholesome role model for Chinese youth, and the emergence of rock and roll in general as a threat to societal stability. The government eventually grew so annoyed at the singer's spreading influence that they banned his music outright and sentenced him to an eight-year prison term on a contrived rape charge, a rite of symbolic public execution that the Chinese call "killing the chicken to scare the monkeys." Zhang Xing insisted that the incident amounted to nothing more than a jealous girlfriend blowing the whistle on one of his affairs. Whatever the sordid details, the Western press picked up the story and made much of China's persecution of rock music, restriction of free speech, and summary justice. Presumably as a result of this embarrassing negative publicity, the Chinese government released Zhang Xing three years into his sentence. He was in the middle of his comeback tour when I played guitar for him in his Chengdu hotel room. No sooner did I give Zhang Xing a brief demonstration of my playing than he asked me to join his band for two shows at the Chengdu sports arena—in just two days! Dumbfounded, I declined at first, stammering that I didn't know the material, but he would have none of it, and the band reassured me that the simple tunes would be a snap for me to learn. I started to warm to the absurd proposition—if nothing else, my cameo turn with a Chinese pop star would make a great yarn to tell over beers back in the States. Shrugging off my misgivings, I accepted Zhang Xing's offer on the condition that I would have ample time to rehearse the songs with the band. As it turned out, we rehearsed only once, and the band was more interested in learning my songs than in teaching me their set. Two days later I found myself onstage in front of 5,000 people, blindly improvising my way through 10 songs I had scarcely heard before—I had to listen to the first few bars of each tune before I even knew which one we were playing. As a concession to their foreign guest, the band also played my instrumental workout, "Huo Guo," which went down fairly well with the crowd. The concerts were full-blown, Vegas-style extravaganzas, complete with ritual flower presentations and dancing girls decked out in Cultural Revolution garb. A highlight of the set was Yinhuochong's rocked-up rendering of the old Maoist anthem "Tai Yang Zui Hong" ("The Sun is Reddest in the East"). Apparently satisfied with my efforts, Zhang Xing asked me to accompany the band to Chongqing for four more concerts at that city's sports arena. This time he wisely used me in fewer songs, instead giving me a solo feature in which I performed Central Asian Uighur music on electric guitar, much to the audience's bewilderment. But by the end of our stint I was feeling utterly foolish playing inane pop tunes that I wouldn't have been caught dead playing in my own country. It was the bizarreness of the situation that had attracted me, not the music. Yet I was grateful to Yinhuochong for performing my music in public, and I admired Zhang Xing for taking the political risk of including me in his program, though doubtless he profited from having an exotic ornament in his backup band. Dennis Rea with dancers, Chongqing Sports Arena 1991 My experience with Zhang Xing opened my eyes to the existence of a highly developed pop music subculture in China, something I had never expected to find in this supposedly repressive communist country. As in the West, the scene came complete with sleazy promoters, leather-clad backstage groupies, hangers-on, posers, and big money. Zhang Xing received 5-6,000 RMB (about $1,000) to sing eight or ten songs, reportedly the highest income among Chinese entertainers up to that time. Each member of Yinhuochong earned 300 RMB per show, or double the average monthly income in China in the late 1980s. Throughout our stay in Chongqing we were served three gigantic meals daily in the hotel banquet hall, along with all the beer and Chinese liquor we could stand. Most of the food went uneaten and was simply thrown away after the meals—and to think that my mother had shamed me into cleaning my plate by saying, "think of the poor starving Chinese." Another thing that struck me about the arena-rock experience in China was the varied makeup of the audiences, encompassing the entire demographic spectrum from toddlers to factory workers to Party officials, a refreshing contrast to the narrow, hipper-than-thou exclusivity of American audiences. Next section | Previous section © 2003 Dennis Rea/Nunatak Dennis Rea | Preface | The Gang of Formosa | Cui Jian | Identity Crisis The Vagaries | The Beijing Jazz Festival and the Rise of Jazz in China NUNATAK e-mail: dennis at dennisrea.com