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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.

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