Popular Music in the Sinophone World
Authors: Xiao Ying , Wang Chuan 
Published: May 2023

Popular music is central to modern culture and contemporary society, which is broadly understood as a popular expression and social and cultural practice aimed for mass appeal and commercial success. In China, a rising superpower in today’s world, popular music has not only attracted serious attention from academics and critics, but it also has been embraced and appreciated by a wide audience in Greater China and across the globe. Chinese popular music emerged as a relatively new field since the 1980s galvanized by and following in the footsteps of China’s opening-up, market reform, and economic boom. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that a substantial amount of attention has been devoted to Western-derived music or influences such as rock and roll and hip hop and the expansive flow of Mandopop and Cantopop. Investigations of such genres largely revolve around the interactions between the local, national, and global, the issues of authorship and authenticity, market and industry, consumer culture, urban media culture and youth subculture, and so on. In a similar fashion, studies on Chinese folk songs that are often tied to particular localities, traditional roots, and ethnic groups also treat the revival and adaptation of Chinese popular folklore as a local response to the national discourse and the pervasive force of globalization. To put it simply, Chinese popular music is a result of East-West encounters and sociopolitical transformations China has undergone since the second half of twentieth century. Thus, a great deal of literature has not only looked into the pivotal roles popular music plays to integrate with the everyday experience and assert identities but also the ways how it reflects and engages sociopolitical changes. Politics and censorship are another important theme taken up and arousing heated debate in the literature. Other critical interventions into the broad field of Chinese popular music studies are cutting-edge attempts to examine the complex and fluid nature of popular music and how it has been implicated in the changing notions of masculinity, femininity, youth, ethnicity, and technological advance. Moreover, Chinese popular music is by no means a singular, monolithic entity. It is defined by multiple music genres (e.g., rock, hip-hop, folk, etc.), different dialects (e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, etc.), geographical areas (e.g., Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, overseas), and the opposites and conflations of rural/urban, public/private, official/resistant, commercial/independent. All these explorations demonstrate that studies of popular music in the Sinophone world is a rich, interdisciplinary field intersecting with and cross-fertilized by the various methods of cultural studies, film and media studies, political science, gender studies, sociology, linguistics, ethnomusicology, transnational and diaspora studies. This general guide lays out the most significant scholarly literature on the topics from different perspectives and disciplines. The selected references are primarily English sources, although the major works, journals, and web resources published in Chinese-language are also cited. Students, scholars, and an educated general reader interested in Chinese culture, in Asian studies, as well as in popular music in general would find this bibliography a handy starting point for advanced research.