From the Highest Court to the Furthest Wasteland: Following the Footprints of Music in Tiananmen Square Protests Wang Meng
Music has always been an important component of social movements. As the one and only protest of its scale and influence in China, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests was a lively music venue. Protesters sang revolutionary songs and played rock music on cassette tapes players in the tent city. At night, the square turned into a concert and dance floor. (Gordon & Hinton, 1995) Cui Jian and Hou Dejian, the two most popular musicians at the time, performed for the protesters on the square. The singers’ featured songs, “Nothing to My Name” (Yiwusuoyou) and “Descendants of the Dragon” (Long de chuanren) became unofficial anthems of the protesters. Hou was deeply involved in the protest by joining the hunger strike initiated by Liu Xiaobo and was one of the negotiators at the dawn of June 4th with the military. In an interview with Tiananmen student leader Wuer Kaixi, he emphasized the importance of singers in the movement: “The people who are most influential among young people are not (the dissident intellectuals) Fang Lizhi and Wei Jingsheng, but singers such as Cui Jian.” (Huang, 2001) In Hong Kong, Concert for Democracy in China was held for 12 hours nonstop to raise money for the protesters on May 27th. After the crackdown, music became an important means of commemorating the protests and preserving memories and protecting legacies against state propaganda and collective amnesia. Even new generations who were born after 1989 wrote songs in memory of the protest. (Li, 2017)
In this essay, I intend to find out what kind of music was used by protesters during the Tiananmen Square protests, and the symbiotic relationship of popular music and the state. I define popular music as the most widespread music that includes both revolutionary mass songs that are imposed from top to bottom to maintain hegemony, and unofficial songs like Gangtai songs (songs popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan) and rock songs that are under the state control yet express not necessarily the state’s interests.
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Communist Legacy Before the end of the Cultural Revolution, the state exerted total control over people’s everyday lives including cultural products they consumed. A left-wing music style that emphasized masculinity dating back to 1930s was the only music style permitted. Only two types of singing, Western heroic bel canto singing (meisheng changfa) and artistic folk/national singing (min’ge/minzu changfa), were promoted. Soft singing and songs that expressed personal feelings were considered “yellow” or “decadent” and were wiped out of people’s aural memory.
The link between music and state control can be dated back to more than two thousand years ago in the Book of Music (Yueji). In Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks in 1942, he stated “Literature and art [should] become a component part of the whole revolutionary machinery”. (Baranovitch, 2003, 193) The early legacy of referring music as “cry out on behalf of the mass” (Jones, 2001) by left-wing musicians like Nie Er, turned into a tool in serving political purposes for the state. There is no wonder that the most familiar music resources for the protesters on the square were the communist cultural legacies.
One of the most popular songs during Tiananmen Square protests was “The Internationale”. The song has long served as a left-wing anthem and sung across time and space. Deriving from French national anthem “La Marseillaise”, the song was once adapted as Soviet anthem after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, until it was replaced by “Hymn of the Soviet Union” at the height of the Great Patriotic War in 1943, when the urge for patriotism ruled over the ideology of international revolution. (Brooke, 2007) The later Chinese national anthem “March of the Volunteers”, was first written as a movie theme song in 1935 and then became the most popular patriotic song during the Sino-Japanese War, was inspired by “The Internationale”. (Yu, 2001) When Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power, “The Internationale” was regarded equally important as national anthem. During Cultural Revolution when the composer of “March of the Volunteers” was criticized, the song lost its supreme status and was replaced by either personality cult songs for Mao Zedong like “The East is Red” and “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman”, or “The Internationale”.
The protesters on the square cleverly used the song that had a state imposed legitimacy to 2
protest against the state. Such a tactic is “an art of the weak”. (Certeau, 1984, 37) From the early use of “The Internationale” as an anti-establishment outcry in socialists and labor movements in the early 20th century, through formalization and consecration by communist countries, the song rejuvenated as calls for change when it was sung on the Tiananmen Square. Another making do example happened on June 3rd. When troops emerged from the Great Hall of the People through underground tunnels, they were immediately surrounded by protesters on the square. Since neither side could take a step forward, they transferred battleground to singing. Military songs such as “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No China”, “Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention”, “Military Anthem of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army”, were sung by both sides, as if which side sang louder would win. On the hot front line, several melees broke out between agitated people. Military songs that symbolized the state power and ideology were once again plagiarized by people and made it a weapon against the state power. (Gordon & Hinton, 1995)
Many CCP officials were students protesters in their youth. Jiang Zemin, at the time the mayor of Shanghai, became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party for his performance in crackdown protests in Shanghai in 1989. He remembered in his article that in 1943, he joined a protest organized by underground Communist Party in Nanjing. The student protests burned opium and smoking equipment captured from opium dens and sang “Graduation Song” before the armed Japanese military police. (Jiang, 2000) The song was written by Nie Er, the writer of national anthem, for a film Plunder of Peach and Plum in 1934. Written in the background of the Japanese invasion, the song was intended to evoke patriotism and nationalism among Chinese people. On May 4th 1989, the Youth Day of China, students held large protests on streets while the official ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement was held on the Tiananmen Square. 70 years ago, students protested the Beiyang government’s weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, igniting nationwide nationalism and a shift to Marxism. The day has been celebrated by the CCP as a hallmark of its origin. Three different protests across three different times were linked by the “Graduation Song”, connecting the history of the CCP as well as China. The state hegemony was challenged by the legacy of itself. Unfortunately high officials in the CCP seemed to have a collective amnesia of their resistant youth and treated students the same way as they were treated in their youth.
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“Popular music both mirrors and shapes society and culture as they change.” (Baranovitch, 2003, 3) I want to single out a song that mirrors the protesters complex feeling of Mao, the symbol and the source of power of the CCP’s rule. It seems impossible for the young people in 1989 to reminisce about the Mao’s ear. But “I Love Peking Tiananmen”, a Children’s song and a personality cult song for Mao written by two adolescents during the Cultural Revolution, was sung by student protesters. The lyrics are simple and catchy: “I love Beijing Tiananmen, the sun rises above Tiananmen. The great leader Chairmen Mao, leads all of us forward”. For people who sang the song during the Tiananmen Square occupation, their goal was reformation not revolution.
They more or less recognized and respected Mao’s legitimacy as a symbol of the state. This is why three radical protesters from Hunan, who fundamentally rejected the legitimacy of the CCP’s rule threw eggs filled with pigment to Mao’s portrait on the Tiananmen Gate on May 23th. They were captured by members of the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation and handed to the police, and they received heavy sentences of 16 years, 20 years and lifelong.
Rock ’n’ Roll That Square In the post-Mao era, different music style started to emerge. While gangtai songs were introduced in the late 70s, rock music, a style that has been seen as subversive, was banned until late 80s. In 1986, an official concert “100-Singer Concert of Year of International Peace” was held in Beijing, and Cui Jian made his first appearance on national television and shocked the country. Cui is labeled as “The Father of Chinese Rock”, and he started his career as a trumpeter in Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra and performed western music for foreigners in diplomat hotels as a side job. He later quit his ‘iron rice bowl’ job and focused on creating his own music. Cui is recognized as one of the featured singers of the musical style Xibei Feng (northwest wind), which first emerged in the late-80s and was under strong influence of Xibei folk songs.
Xibei Feng belonged to a large-scale Root-Seeking (xungen) cultural movement at the time. It was an attempt to re-establish a sense of identity in the post-revolutionary era when people were
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deprived of history and tradition, cynical about communism and shocked by Western culture. Young people’s dissatisfaction and a sense of oppression expressed in Xibei Feng reached a high when the Tiananmen Square Protests broke out. (Baranovitch, 2003) Rock music was a forging power in building up a base for protests.
Cui’s success could not be separated from the state’s endorsement. His first national appearance on television, his solo concert held months before the Tiananmen Square Protests, his first record “Rock and Roll on the New Long March” were all part of the state’s strategies to control rock music and make profits from it. The latter is obvious in the example that the government authorized Cui’s concert not long after the Tiananmen massacre to raise money for the 1990 Asian Games.
In Cui’s early career in mid-1980s, he wrote standard love songs like his contemporaries, including his iconic songs “A Piece of Red Cloth” and “Nothing to My Name”. But as he used various components from revolutionary era in his songs and his performance, his music was interpreted as heavily political. In “Nothing to my name”, he boldly spoke out the feeling no one dared to speak. His songs were circulated underground before the protests. The protests only made him more famous especially overseas thereafter.
(Photo retrieved from https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%80%E6%97%A0%E6%89%80%E6%9C%89_(%E6% 5
AD%8C%E6%9B%B2)
On May 19th 1989, Cui went to Tiananmen Square and performed four songs to students who were in a hunger strike. Four songs he performed were “Once Again From the Top”, “Rock and Roll on the New Long March”, “Like a Knife”, and “A Piece of Red Cloth”. Before he sang “Once Again From the Top”, he explained to the audience that he would change several pronouns in the lyrics from “I” to “you”. That part of lyrics read:
You do not want to leave, you do not want to exist You do not want to live a fulfilled life You want to leave, you want to exist You want to die and start over again
In an audio recording from the scene, Cui said it was his third time to visit the square, not having brought instruments on previous visits, and he only had 20% hope of performing, and 80% of just coming to see the students. Between songs there were arguments about whether the performance should be continued because some worried the students could not take the boisterous music at the seventh day of hunger strike. After playing three songs, he confirmed with the audience if they could take more music. Cui said if there was one student who did not want him to play, he would stop; it was for the safety of everyone. The crowd asked for “A Piece of Red Cloth” vehemently. Before he played the last song, he said “you” in the lyrics should be interpreted as the government. The lyrics read:
On that day you used a piece of red cloth
To blindfold my eyes and also cover the sky You asked me what do I see I said that I see happiness That feeling really made me comfortable Made me forget that I had no place to live
Before he sang, he asked the audience to cover their eyes with a red cloth and see if it felt 6
comfortable. It was his iconic image when he performed the song. The sound of sirens was heard in the background from time to time, casted a looming shadow over the music scene. (Cui, 1989) The next day martial law was enforced and the hunger strike was forced to stop. In “A Piece of Red Cloth”, Cui turns the color of revolution “into a nightmare, a paint, a symbol of violent deception and subjugation.” (Baranovitch, 2003, 239) It symbolizes that Chinese society was blindfolded by the CCP during the revolutionary era, and especially during the Cultural Revolution.
Immediately after the crackdown, CCP ordered to detain prominent rock stars, as they were considered causes of social disturbances, but this retribution was only temporary. Only half a year later, Cui was able to convince the authorities to authorize a tour, by promising to donate one million yuan from the income as a compensation for the government’s financial loss on 1990 Asian Games. (Huang, 2003) During his performance in Chengdu, after he sang “The Last Gunshot” which was written to commemorate Sino-Vietnamese War in 1987, he said to the audience “We hope the gunshots we heard last year, is the last gunshot”. (Li, 2019) The authorities were so alarmed by the growing political implications of his tour that they cancelled the remaining stops of his tour.
In the following years, Cui grew weary of being associated with politics. He wanted people to pay more attention to his art than politics. Chinese rock gained much of its recognition because of “China’s oppressive political reality and the unique meaning that rock gains in such a context.” (Baranovitch, 2003, 230) After the crackdown, rock music attracted more audience as people turned to rock to soothe the pain. Songs created about the movement reached a high peak right after the movement. But rock music entered a long decline since 1993 as people grew weary of politics and more drawn to Tongsu (popular) music.
Gangtai Music and Pan-Chinese Identity After the Cultural Revolution, gangtai music was the first genre that was introduced into China. Dating back the history of gangtai music, it was a continuation of “yellow music” that was banned from mainland China into the peripheries such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. The soft singing and lyrics that express individualism were missing in China for decades.
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Hou Dejian is a Taiwanese popular singer who defected to China through Hong Kong at the age of 27 in 1983. The reason he slipped into China is unclear. One factor might be his strong sense of belonging to Mainland China and Chinese identity. He is a descendant of Chinese soldiers who retreated to Taiwan with the Government of the Republic of China (ROC) around 1949. Growing up in a military dependents’ village that was often associated with urban slums in people mind, he was influenced by the homesick and nostalgic atmosphere of the community.
In 1978, when he heard the news that the United States would cease recognizing the ROC as China and establish diplomatic relations with the PRC, he wrote his best hit “Descendants of Dragon”. (Ji, 2015) The lyrics reminds audiences of China’s one hundred years of humiliation since the Opium War and urges the dragon of the east to rise again, reflecting the mentality of people in Taiwan when they were abandoned by the United States. There are two notable lines in the song’s lyrics: “Although I’ve never seen the beauty of the Yangtze, in my dreams I miraculously travel the Yangtze’s waters. Although I’ve never heard the strength of the Yellow River, the rushing and surging waters are in my dreams”, reflecting the identity awkwardness of Taiwanese who identify themselves as Chinese. (Heirs of the Dragon) The song stirred a sensation in Taiwan. The Director-General of the Government Information Office James Soong Chu-yu revised the lyrics himself and asked Hou to sing it accordingly, which Hou denied. In Soong’s version, an urge for successors to grow up fast and take responsibility was added. But as Hou defected to China, the song was banned by the ROC government. (Sun, 2010) Not only was the Chinese authority trying to make use of popular music, the Taiwan government was also trying to adapt it.
His defection was warmly welcomed by the Chinese authority to indicate China’s openness. Hou was the first Tongsu singer on the national television CCTV and achieved huge success in China. His song “Descendants of Dragon” first appeared on CCTV New Year’s Gala in 1985, performed by an American Chinese singer Huang Jinbo wearing a suit, expressing an pan-Chinese ideology in which China was at the center. The trumpet heard at the beginning of the song sounds similar to a dirge often used in official funerals, reflecting the authority’s use of the song as a political instrument to evoke feelings of national humiliation and patriotism. Hou performed the song himself on the CCTV New Year’s Gala in 1988. The song written in the background of Taiwan’s 8
isolation from the world, was reinterpreted as a patriotic song for China and the term “Descendants of the Dragon” became an acronym of Chinese people including all minorities. Although most minorities do not resemble or share ancestry with Han Chinese which is the largest ethnic group in China, the lyrics repeat “In the ancient East there was a group of people; they were all descendants of the dragon”, “Black eyes, black hair, yellow skin”. The Yellow River and Yangtze River are depicted as the common origin of all Chinese in the lyrics. Nevertheless, the song appealed to Chinese people who just escaped decades long political turmoil and wished to keep up with the ever-changing world.
In the Tiananmen Square protests, Hou wasn’t very active at first, until he went to Hong Kong and performed at the Concert for Democracy in China. He altered two lines in the performance: “Surrounded on all sides by the appeasers’ swords” was changed to “Surrounded on all sided by dictators swords”, and “Black hair, black eyes, yellow skin” became “Whether you are willing or not, forever and ever an heir of the dragon”. The second alteration, it was inspired by people he met in the mainland who were not ethnically Han Chinese but Chinese nationals, including the student leader Wuer Kaixi. (Heirs of the Dragon)
On June 2nd, College teacher and Intellectual Liu Xiaobo initiated a hunger strike with three friends, Hou Dejian, Zhou Duo, and Gao Xin, whom were known as “four gentlemen of honor”. Their intention was to restore rationality to the movement as the movement was getting clueless and chaotic and the population on the square was dropping. But their hunger strike was followed by a bigger wave of irrationality. The square filled up with people once again. Liu said in an interview that he thought most people went to the square were not because of their hunger strike manifesto, but because of Hou’s participation. Hou said he was there to represent all singers and audiences from the Concert for Democracy in China. He wore the T-shirt signed by singers from the concert and showed big stars’ signatures to the crowd, inciting waves of cheers, making the scene more like a celebrity reality show than a serious hunger strike. Affected by the passion of the large crowd, Liu said in a later interview that as he saw so many people on the square, he felt defeating the martial law was within reach and his voice was no longer rational. (Gordon & Hinton,1995)
On the night of June 3rd, Hou created and performed a new song, “Beautiful Chinese”,
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which was never performed or published again. The full lyrics read:
People who love freedom, spread out our wings People who have conscience, open our chests People who fight for democracy, unite our strength Ugly Chinese, how beautiful we are today Everything can be changed Everything will not be too far Everything depends on our will Everything is in sight
The order was given to open fire on the night of June 3rd. Being unaware of the situation on the frontline, people on the square at first thought the police that would only beat them with sticks. Before dawn, the army had surrounded the square. The four men of honor who started the hunger strike negotiated between students and the army, and made time for students to retreat from the square. After the crackdown, Hou was not arrested because of his Taiwanese status. But his appearances on foreign press and open criticism against Chinese authority made him intolerable. He was finally driven into exile to Taiwan in 1990. Hou did not appear on a stage in China until 21 years later. (Hai, 2011) After his exile to Taiwan, Hou also faded out of the music industry. (Xu, 2007) “Beautiful Chinese”, the song he wrote and sang on the square, was like a shooting star, lighting the sky like burning magnesium for a second, then forever disappearing into history.
In 2000, American Chinese singer Wang Leehom revised the song, adding an English rap verse referring to the experience of first generation of Taiwan immigrants in the United State. Wang Leehom is actually the nephew of Li Jianfu, the original singer of “Descendants of the Dragon” in 1980. Like his predecessor, American Chinese singer Huang Jinbo, Wang Leehom appeared in CCTV New Year’s Gala in 2012, singing the first half of “Descendants of the Dragon” and adding a new line mixed with English and Chinese, “I’m a Long De Chuanren (descendant of the dragon)”. Compared to the 1985 original, the 2012 version was exhilarating and fashionable. The singer chanted in half English half Chinese, proclaiming his identity in English to global audience, yet the word “Long De Chuanren” was not translated as a sign of confidence in his culture.
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(Photo retrieved from https://kknews.cc/entertainment/3z4b333.html )
For the authorities, even though the patriotic sentiment is tarnished by its creator’s behavior and its wider use in the protests, it is still considered as a powerful song and can be used as a tool for imperceptibly ideological education. By taking it out of its historical context and giving it new meanings with new appearance, the song lost all its teeth. In 2009, “Descendants of the Dragon” was selected by the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party as one of 100 patriotic songs.
In Adorno’s view, popular culture is “producing consumables which condition people to insist on the very ideology that enslaves them.” (Huang, 2003) Culture as industry is a tranquilizer that makes people forget their troubles and go back to work next day. The Chinese authority develops various strategies to adopt popular music like “Descendants of the Dragon” to resonate with the national ideologies. The strategies were not direct bans and censorship, but to actively work on it, cooperating with self- employed singers like Wang Leehom who seeks financial benefits from China. Singers like Hou Dejian were not always working against the
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authority, sometimes singer’s personal goal was overlapping with the authority such as promoting nationalism.
Memorial Songs After the June 4th massacre, many songs were written and performed to commemorate the bloodbath, both inside and outside China. “Bloodstained Glory”, a patriotic song that was written in 1986 and was performed on the CCTV New Year’s Gala in 1987, transformed into a memorial song for the dead souls on Tiananmen Square, and had been performed annually in Victoria Park in Hong Kong since 1989. The lyrics “The flag of our Republic has our blood- stained glory” can refer to the soldiers died in Sino-Vietnamese War, which was its original intention, or interpreted as a reference to the people killed during the crackdown. In China, one early version of the song was sung by Peng Liyuan, the Chinese First Lady to be. As a soprano, Peng’s voice in the song seems to be lighthearted and full of hope. After the June 4th massacre, the song was performed by various artists outside China as a way of showing their disagreement with Chinese authority, leading to a ban of the song in China.
In the Feng Xiaogang film’s Youth (2017), the story was set in the Cultural Revolution and Sino- Vietnamese War. Although “Bloodstained Glory” was the most iconic song for Sino-Vietnamese War, it was not used in the film. However, a parody video made by netizens used footage of the film and the song sung by Peng. It combined the most legitimized singing voice and video clip from the mainstream blockbuster, but it was still banned.
In Hong Kong, many popular singers such as Beyond, Jenny Tseng, and Anthony Wong, all performed the song in mandarin. Among the artists above, Anita Mui might have contributed the most impressive version. She was not only a Cantopop Diva at the time but also an outspoken supporter of Tiananmen Square protests. She once said “I have already taken a Canadian passport...After June 4th, I thought very clearly that I would not go...I will still stay in Hong Kong and do my best to make this life regretless.” (Lau, 2020) One year after the massacre, she performed the song in her Xia Ri Yao Guang Hua Concert (Glory to China Summer Concert). She wore a glittering red robe and sang the song in a deep sorrow voice. On June 4th 2020, Hong Kong Alliance held a small 30 minutes online candlelight vigil, breaking its tradition of
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holding grand ceremonies in Victoria Park for the last 30 years due to the change in the political environment. As one of the standard proceedings of the vigil, “Bloodstained Glory” was played and the version the organizer used this time was Mui’s. Compared to the mainland born soprano singer Wang Hong’s version played in 2019, Mui’s emotive voice added sorrow and a layer of Hong Kong identity to the vigil. The song, once a part of collective memories of people from PRC, was forgotten in the mainland and became part of the collective memories in Hong Kong.
(Photo retrieved from http://comebacktolove.blogspot.com/2015/12/1990720-818-30_5.html)
The Dynamics of Hegemony and Resistance Music not only mirrors but also constructs the society. The rise and fall of rock music in China reflected and catalyze the social transformation from the disenchanted post-revolutionary era to the money-driven capitalist era. Meanwhile, the hegemony of the state and the resistance of people and artists have not been only competing with each other but also coexisting, sometimes collusive.
Raymond Williams said “A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or structure. It is a realized complex of experiences and limits. it has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, and challenged by pressures not at all its own.” (Baranovitch, 2003, 222) The relationship between 13
hegemony and resistance is symbiotic rather than a simplistic binary relationship. While the hegemony has been developing strategies to manage and produce popular culture that is conducive to the state’s interests, the mass develops tactics and seizes every opportunity to maneuver popular culture into their interests. “Two forces are in a constant process of negotiation” (Baranovitch, 2003, 222), from the revolutionary songs used by both sides to promote morale, to the evolving relationship of rock music and the state interference, and the fates of “Descendants of the Dragon” and “Bloodstained Glory”, one of which is adapted as a soft political tool while another is discarded but find its vigor outside China.
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