By J. Sri Raman
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Thursday 19 July 2007
Some 10,000 tents have sprung up, all of a sudden, on a vast green area in north China's Inner Mongolia. To some, the scene might recall the eve of a Genghis Khan expedition into a country that has coped with many a covetous invader. What it augurs today, however, is a weekend of music - and much more.
On July 20-22, China will host a cultural event of a curious kind and complex significance. The Green Flag Rock Festival, to be celebrated here, will be a gala affair, to go by official and media publicity given to the occasion. Guitar-strumming participants from not only the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong but also Taiwan, Mongolia and Tuva (a republic of the Russian federation) are gathering at this far-away venue to present an interesting fusion of pop and politics.
It was not exactly a publicity blitz for the festival that started in Beijing a month ago. The media announcements of the event did not seem to create any mass excitement, at least none visible to a foreign visitor like me. But then, no one ever claimed that rock or pop music was part of the mainstream Chinese culture. The music still mattered: it had once made a political difference, and can do so again, though not in the same way.
The appeal of the mainstream Chinese music was obvious. One could see and hear it, any time of the day, on the CCTV (China Central Television) in one's hotel room. On the music channel of the country's largest TV network, classical operas keep up a continuous stream of music from the lips of colorfully attired actors on the stage with painted backdrops.
As the veteran warrior or any other vintage character, swinging his stick-on beard for effect, elaborates musical phrases with his on-stage companion, an obvious connoisseur, nodding and shaking his head appreciatively, the audience breaks into spontaneous applause. Coming from India with its own street theater and similarly savored classical music, it was easy for me to empathize. As easy, perhaps, as it may be hard for the average Chinese audience to respond to something like rock.
Confucian values like "filial piety" may not coexist comfortably with responsiveness to rebellious rock, but China does have its own following for this form of music. The Chinese rock tradition is only a few years older than the Tiananmen student protest (1989), for which it helped pave the way, however limited its contribution. The tradition continues, though the music has been transformed, in both its medium and message. The rock song of that protest, hailed by some as the "anthem of Tiananmen," was Cui Jian's 'Nothing to My Name' (less frequently translated as 'I Own Nothing'). Charismatic Cui sang: "I am giving you my aspirations/And my freedom too./But you always laugh at me/Because I have nothing." Fellow-protester Chang Kuan asked: "While the granddads in their seventies lead the nation,/Uncles in their sixties take care of modernization,/Those in their fifties retire and take it easy;/Our brothers in their forties are with money-making busy./They say only once you're thirty do you really understand./But where in all this do we twenty-year-olds stand?/Some are busy with Reform, others go overseas./So what's left for us twenty-year-olds - can someone tell me, please?"
Cui, now in his mid-forties, is called the "father" and sometimes even the "grandfather" of Chinese rock. And the twenties of Chang are as dim and distant a memory as Tiananmen itself. The point to note is that both Cui and Chang have continued, though they practice rock as a profession, too. They have continued to hold concerts and sing to screaming fans, though without drawing huge crowds.
Tiananmen Square is no big draw for the tourists today. Much bigger crowds throng the Forbidden City, right opposite the venue of the protest that the much-trumpeted support from the West actually weakened. The protest was then officially pilloried as nothing more than a plot hatched abroad, Beijing today takes a more benign view of the rebellion - as well as the rock.
Not all rock musicians take kindly to the official approval of "rock with Chinese characteristics." But the organizers of this weekend's event themselves claim such characteristics for it. Jiang Shilong, lead singer of the Old Demon of the Western Mountain (Xishan Laoyao), says, "The Chinese rock music does not mean decadence, confusion or extremes, but love, responsibility and dreams."
Green movements elsewhere may have got along well with rock music, but no organizer of any other rock festival would have emphasized an ecological point with Jiang's force. Says he, "I hope our audience at the festival will pay attention to the environment and won't litter, which has been a problem at many such festivals."
This rock festival will certainly not be one of rebellion in the familiar sense of the word. Whether it will still voice aspirations of a new China, only listeners from this ancient land can tell. We will have to wait for the strains from Inner Mongolia to waft into the outside world.
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