Something's Happening There: The Politics Of Chinese Punk Rock

The sensational portraits of Beijing punk rockers in Matthew Niederhauser's SOUND KAPITAL – a new art gallery exhibition and book – call to mind the famous paraphrase of the father of politics, Plato: "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake."

So maybe, just maybe, some American-born shake, rattle & roll will make the post-Mao monolith of China move in ways its rulers never expected. What happens in China matters on Main Street America. China's ownership of $800 billion of U.S. Treasury securities, plus a tangle of other economic and national security issues with us, colors our red, white & blue. President Obama's state visit this week will drop him into negotiations covering China's neighbors Afghanistan and Pakistan, human rights, global climate change, and China's chunk of our troubled economy.

Those political and diplomatic nuances Obama faces are shaped by cultural forces. Culture creates our perceptive and emotional lenses. What we watch on TV and at the movies, the sports we play or root for, what we see in our museums and art galleries and on graffiti walls, what we read in our novels and our comic strips, plus the music we hear, moves us in ways we often can't articulate or deny – and from that emotional/psychological "cultural" place, we make "political" decisions.

Nowhere is the politics of culture more serious than in China, where in 1966, dictator Mao Zedong launched a 10-year "cultural revolution" to consolidate and perpetuate his power with a calculated tsunami that mauled millions of lives and made the ghost of George Orwell's "Big Brother" proud. Everything – business, politics, all forms of culture – had to conform to the Red Guards' interpretations of Maoist political correctness.

Now business-friendly post-Mao China officially regrets the "excesses" of Mao's mass political movement -- and spotlights it about as much as Beijing leaders discuss the pro-democracy movement Mao's successors crushed in Tiananmen Square. China is focused on emerging as the dominant political and business superpower in a 21^st Century world, where excesses can spin out of control and cost you a glorious future faster than you can spell Lehman Brothers.

Which brings us back to the scores of Chinese punk rockers American Matthew Niederhauser photographed up against the red wall of the Beijing nightclub D-22. Talk about culture! Many experts date rock 'n' roll's birth in Communist China to 1984 and homegrown rocker Cui Jian's song "Nothing To My Name." Since then – contending with everything from government censorship to music piracy – Chinese rockers have held festivals, won fans and survived in a "looser" non-democracy than anyone could have imagined in the Cold War days of the "Bamboo Curtain."

Still, mainstream Chinese rock 'n' roll seems not to have produced the revolutionary type of music that changes politics in the fashion American pundits of both the left and the right attribute to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Neil Young, Joan Baez, Marvin Gaye and Bruce Springsteen, though China's so called "prison songs" of the late 1980's blended traditional Chinese music with the angst about growing up in the Mao's repressive eras.

As for punk rock, Niederhauser notes that even with its underground centered in a few Beijing clubs, it is "impossible to attribute a core message" to the musicians. They sing about alienation, relationship problems, the struggle to stand out in a population where conformity rules.

Dude: they're musicians, not politicians!

What makes them political – especially in China – is that they exist at all. Bottom line, maybe the Chinese punk rockers' cultural effect is but a momentary echo off the Great Wall, a sound and fury signifying...not much as it fades away. To me, their music seems like shallow clatter and their lyrics more narcissistic than poetic.

But when I drift from one red-back-dropped Niederhauser Chinese punk rock portrait to another and then another and another, I can't help wondering what rough beast, its moment come round now, slinks through China's alleys, clutching an electric ax born in the U.S.A.