Jian Xiao - Punk Culture in Contemporary China.

Jian Xiao

Punk Culture in Contemporary China

Jian Xiao

School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

ISBN 978-981-13-0976-2 e-ISBN 978-981-13-0977-9

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0977-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952908

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Cover design by Akihiro Nakayama

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Acknowledgements

The research upon which this book is based was made possible with the funding by The Fundamental Research Funds for Sun Yat-sen University in 2017 (17000-31610138) and The Bilingual Curriculum Training Project Communication Studies (17000-18822604). A previous version of Chap. 3 was published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies 2017, 20(6): 707723, @2017 European Journal of Cultural Studies ; a previous version of Chap. 6 was published in the Chinese Journal of Communication 2017, 10(3): 246263, @2017 Chinese Journal of Communication .

I would like to thank all those who participated in the research and my family and friends who supported me. I would particularly like to thank Professor Paula Guerra and Dr. Jim Donaghey who contributed their research in Portugal and Indonesia.

Contents

Jian Xiao and Paula Guerra

Part IPunk in China

Part IIA Comparison with Intra-Asian and European Punks

Jim Donaghey and Jian Xiao

Paula Guerra and Jian Xiao

Appendix: Biographical Characteristics of Respondents

Index

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 The performance of Mr. Lis band

Fig. 5.1 Moshing in punk performance

Notes on Authors

Lead author

Jian Xiao

(Loughborough University) works at School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-sen University. She has published in European Journal of Cultural Studies , Chinese Journal of Communication , Punk & Post-Punk , and so on. Her research interests focus on new media and cultural studies. E-mail: JX.jianxiao@yahoo.com.

Co-authors

Jim Donaghey

(Loughborough University) is a punk anarchist working in academia, at Queens University Belfast. Jim is an active participant in his local punk and anarchist scenes and is also the web editor of www.AnarchistStudies.blog and member of the editorial board of Punk & Post-Punk journal. Jim is in several punk bands, including Gulder and Lawfucker. E-mail: j.donaghey@qub.ac.uk.

Paula Guerra

(University of Porto) is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto and researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the same University (IS-UP), where she coordinates the subgroup Artistic Creation, Cultural Practices and Policies . She is coordinator and founder of the KISMIF Conference . She co-authored various books and her numerous journal articles have been published. E-mail: paula.kismif@gmail.com.

This book explores punk lives in contemporary China. Discussion about punk is currently thriving in academia, and focusing on Chinese punk can be regarded as in line with this trend. That said, the general lack of discussion about punk phenomena in Asian contexts demands attention since local distinctiveness could provide a possible avenue for new interpretation. With this book, we seek to address this gap somewhat, primarily by presenting biographies of Chinese punk musicians, the specific society in which they are situated, and how the use of technology contributes to the development of the punk phenomenon in China. The scope of the research also extends further, to examination of the Chinese punk phenomenon in a global context and comparison with other non-Anglo-American societies where the phenomena are mostly neglected.

It is hard to define punk with any single definition. The word punk began as US jargon describing certain groups of youngsters at the bottom of the social structure, such as hobos and black homosexuals (Laing : 124). It gained wider recognition only with its application to music. First it denoted a New York music scene, and then, with developments in the British music scene (related mainly to the London-based scene) and following the Sex Pistols, it gained global visibility.

Sara Thompson () proposes approaching the punk phenomenon in terms of genres of punk textuality and the concept of the punk scene. While the first of these two facets is related to music, style, fanzines, and events, the latter covers a series of major punk scenes. To be specific, the punk scene started in 19741976 in New York, continuing with the second-wave English scene, which arose in London in 19761978. The third major wave was the Californian hardcore scene of 19781982, with the later emergence of the straight-edge hardcore scene in America.

Considering the profound development and prominence of punk in the histories of Anglo-American societies, one should not be surprised to find that most of the academic work focuses on punk phenomena in those societies. For instance, in Dick Hebdiges Subculture: TheMeaningof Style (), thereby addressing the problem of sparseness of empirical evidence that once existed in the CCCS approach to subcultural studies.