Punk Culture in Contemporary China

Abstract

Since its emergence in London and New York in the late 1970s, punk music has subsequently become a global phenomenon (see Dines, Gordon, Guerra, & Bestley, 2019), spreading across the world to regions as diverse as Mexico (O’Connor, 2003), South Africa (Basson, 2007) and Indonesia (Prasetyo, 2017). In the early 1990s, punk music reached China. This book by Jian Xiao (with some co-authored sub-chapters by JimDonaghey and Paula Guerra) situates this arrival within a global context, tracing the history of punk, its meanings, norms and identity, and referencing handouts and performances that capture the punk scene. The influence of punk music is generally understood in terms of how it challenged established meanings and narratives, including capitalism and globalisation. However, most of the narratives in question related to Western contexts, and the authors note a “general lack of discussion about punk phenomena in Asian contexts” (p. 1). This opens new avenues of interpretation that are likely to be of interest to cultural sociologists who explore meaning-making and those with an interest in post-colonialism. The book’s nine chapters are organised as two main sections. The first (and longer) section investigates punk in China while the second compares the punk scenes in Indonesia and Portugal. All of the case studies emphasise the need to look beyond established narratives to understand these marginal punk scenes. As the opening chapter explains, a sub-cultural approach is inadequate in the Chinese context, where punk music is characterised by a plurality of styles and sub-genres, and its devotees come from diverse classes and professional backgrounds. To develop this pluralistic notion of punk, the authors ground their theoretical approach in Howard Becker’s notion of art worlds and Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural fields. To more fully develop their interpretation, one might have welcomed a slightly riskier approach referencing authors who look beyond established Western narratives—for instance, Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of hybridity or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Other—but these are surprisingly absent. Nevertheless, in acknowledging the role of the “myriad of complementary activities” (p. 8) in the production of cultural objects, the discussion of art worlds and cultural fields is somewhat adapted for the Chinese context.