Welcome to Francis Academic Press

Frontiers in Art Research, 2022, 4(9); doi: 10.25236/FAR.2022.040902.

Revival on the Other Side of the Country: Cantopop in Mainland China

Author(s)

Tingyu Yan1, Jiajun Tang2

Corresponding Author:
Tingyu Yan
Affiliation(s)

1School of Music, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA

2Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA

Abstract

Cantopop, Hong Kong pop music in Cantonese, has impacted Mainland China since its gradual introduction, both legally and illegally, after China's "Reform and Opening-Up" in 1978. It provided Mainland Chinese with fashionable music, lifestyle ideas, and a way of understanding Hongkongers, the people on the "other side" of the Shenzhen river boundary. In the late 1990s, Cantopop's popularity declined in Hong Kong, while it survived on the Mainland in various bootleg forms sold by street vendors and witnessed a recent revival on Chinese TV and the Internet. This paper reviews how Cantopop traversed language and culture barriers to reach Mainland China and considers its future.

Keywords

Cantopop, Chinese popular music, China Mainland music culture, social change, globalization

Cite This Paper

Tingyu Yan, Jiajun Tang. Revival on the Other Side of the Country: Cantopop in Mainland China. Frontiers in Art Research (2022) Vol. 4, Issue 9: 7-17. https://doi.org/10.25236/FAR.2022.040902.

References

[1] Law, L. Y. (2022) 'Re-thinking Popular Culture', in Hong Kong History: Themes in Global Perspective, edited by Man-Kong Wong and Chi-Man Kwong, Palgrave Macmillan, 181-216.

[2] Chu, Y. W. and E. Leung. (2013) 'Remapping Hong Kong Popular Music: Covers, Localisation and the Waning Hybridity of Cantopop', Popular Music, 32(1), 65-78.

[3] Norris, C. (ed.). (1989) Music and Politics of Culture (London), Lawrence & Wishart Ltd.

[4] Wrenn, J. (1975) 'POPULARIZATION OF PUTONGHUA', Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 3(2), 221–27.

[5] Ho, W. C. (2017) 'Secondary School Students' Preferences for Popular Music and Perceptions of Popular Music Learned in School Music Education in Mainland China', Research Studies in Music Education, 39(1), 19-37.

[6] Ho, W. C. (2016) 'Popular songs and social change: East meets West in Shanghai, China', in Trends in Music Information Seeking, Behavior, and Retrieval for Creativity, ed. P. Kostagiolas, K. Martzoukou and C. Lavranos (Hershey, PA), 58-77 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0270-8.ch004.

[7] Leng, S. J. (1991) 'The Shock of Hong Kong and Taiwan Popular Songs', Popular Music and Society, 15(2), 23-32.

[8] Gao, X. and J. Trent. (2009) 'Understanding mainland Chinese students' motivations for choosing teacher education programmes in Hong Kong', Journal of Education for Teaching, 35(2), 145-159.

[9] Witzleben, J. L. (1999) 'Cantopop and Mandopop in Pre-Postcolonial Hong Kong: Identity Negotiation in the Performances of Anita Mui Yim-Fong', Popular Music, 18(2), 241-258.

[10] Chow, R. (1990) 'Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question about Revolution', Discourse, 13(1), 129-148.

[11] Chu, Y. W. (2017) Hong Kong Cantopop: A Concise History. Hong Kong University Press.

[12] Rapuano, D. L. (2001) 'Becoming Irish or becoming Irish music? Boundary construction in Irish music communities’, Journal of American Culture, 24(1-2), 103-13.