Ethno project proposal: Chinese pop between Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese in UCSD

Siu Hei Lee
Preliminary Proposal for MUS 251 (Ethnomusicology seminar), Fall 2012

         15 years into the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1997, Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese still arguably hold distinct cultural and ethnic identities.[1] How does this distinction manifest among students in University of California San Diego?[2] I attempt to answer this question by investigating their engagement with Chinese popular music, by which I mean all kinds of popular songs produced by Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China-based musicians.[3] My goal is to identify habits of popular music consumption within the two communities, and to see how Chinese popular music serves as a common ground and identity marker between the two ethnicities.

         A quick search on popular music consumption in young diasporic communities yields no result. However, two research tracks shall be very useful for my project. Firstly, among other authors, Nimrod Baranovitch has written extensively on the politics within Chinese popular music. Of particular interest to my project is the feminization of Hong Kong identity in a PRC-controlled popular music video around 1997.[4] It would be interesting to see if overseas Mainland Chinese students of this generation “feminize” Hong Kong in a similar way, through their attitude and consumption of Chinese pop music. Much literature on Chinese popular music is devoted to the rock genre; however, with the exception of Taiwanese rock bands, I do not see overseas Hong Kong and Chinese students as rock aficionados.[5] Secondly, there is much research on the use of music by diasporic communities. Vol. 16, issue 1 of Ethnomusicology Forum is devoted to “Musical Performance in the Diaspora,” and there are also separate studies on popular music consumption in diasporic communities, such as the Minang community in Indonesia.[6] I may look into the methodologies employed in these research projects.

         For my project, I am intending to focus on undergraduate students at UCSD between the age of 17 and 24. I can collect information from Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese students during the activities of the Hong Kong Student Union (HKSU) and the Chinese Union (CU), two large student organizations on campus. The following demographic variety will be noted, for they affect the informants’ engagement with Chinese pop music: 1) Length of time that they have stayed overseas 2) Location of their family members 3) Hometown (for the Mainland Chinese students) 4) Level of education attained in their hometown/ country. I shall conduct questionnaire research before the orientation evenings of the clubs (both on October 2, Tuesday). With the help with a couple of colleagues, I expect to successfully finish 20 to 30 questionnaires for each club orientation. Afterward, I will send out online questionnaire through Facebook in attempt to further enlarge the pool of informants, and to ask new questions that evolve from the physical questionnaire interviews. I will then select about 5 students from those I met at the orientation evenings, and conduct individual interviews with them.

       What kind of questions am I going to ask? A detailed draft of the questionnaires shall be submitted by the first week of class. To investigate habits of pop music consumptions, I may draw a list of Chinese pop hits by year, and see what year range does their listening repertoire cover.  I may also draw a list by genre, such as sentimental pop, political pop, rock, hip-hop, and see what they listen to. Some other questions may be:

·      Can you quickly name 5 Mainland Chinese/ Hong Kong/ Taiwanese singers? (I am interested in who they are going to mention. Which generation are the singers from?)

·      What is the one (or two) song that means the most to you? Why?

·      Who is your favorite singer? Why?

·      Do you pay attention to pop song composers and lyricists?

·      How do you access music? Have you ever purchased popular music?

To probe the common grounds and identity markers, I may ask questions like:

·      What are some Chinese popular songs that you would share with a new friend from Hong Kong/ Mainland China in a friendly environment?

·      Are there pop songs that you consider as representative of Hong Kong or Chinese identity (Mainland Chinese students, to my knowledge, usually consider themselves as Chinese, not as “Mainland” Chinese)

·      What are some Chinese popular songs that you would introduce to a new friend from Hong Kong/ Mainland China, if you are to promote Hong Kong/ Chinese culture to them?

·      What is your impression on the Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese popular music scenes? What are their differences?

I do have some expected results in my mind. (Here we go, my biases.) I expect the common ground between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese students to be Taiwanese Mandopop, the pop rock of Mayday in particular. I guess that most Hong Kong students will not be able to name 5 Mainland China-based singers, and that Mainland Chinese students will name Hong Kong singers who are popular in the 90s (not 2000s). Mainland Chinese students may not be able to name a pop song that introduces Chinese culture, whereas Hong Kong students will have trouble deciding which song they want to introduce to their Mainland Chinese friends.

My conclusion will discuss the extent by which Chinese popular music serve as an emblem of identity between overseas Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese youth in a college where Asians are not a minority. Will the research results be a reflection of the inter-ethnic conflicts/ ambivalence in Hong Kong and Mainland China? Or, does diaspora integrate Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese youngsters? I will be very eager to know.

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[1] This may be ascribed to differences in language, political system, education, lifestyle, etc. One may consult the very rich postcolonial scholarship about Hong Kong. The public opinion program at the University of Hong Kong constantly conducts surveys on issues of ethnic identity in Hong Kong. At no instance in these 15 years do more than 40% of Hong Kongers see themselves as “Chinese citizens.” The latest figure, collected in June 2012, is less than 20%. See http://hkupop.hku.hk/english/popexpress/ethnic/eidentity/poll/chart/eIdentity_chicitizen.gif and http://hkupop.hku.hk/english/popexpress/ethnic/index.html. I have not come across any similar research conducted in Mainland China.

[2] The research results at the UCSD campus cannot be accounted for American college campuses in general. Here, Asians are the majority in terms of race, and the total number of international students from Hong Kong and Mainland China (not counting those who hold American passport) exceeds 400.

[3] My original idea is to include the Taiwanese community as well. But I would rather narrow my focus at the moment.

[4] See Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices, p. 200.

[5] Baranovitch have speculated the decline of rock music in China in the 1990s, and Jeroen de Kloet shows the blurry boundary between rock and pop in Chinese audiences’ minds. Yiu Wai Chu states that “rock is seen as non-mainstream music” in Hong Kong. See de Kloet, “ ‘Let Him Fucking See the Green Smoke Beneath My Groin’: The Mythology of Chinese Rock” in Postmodernism and China, and Chu, “Before and after the Fall: Mapping Hong Kong Cantopop in the Global Era,” working paper of the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, at http://eprints.hkbu.edu.hk/74/1/63_Stephen_Chu.pdf.

[6] The reference/ bibliography of the opening essay of the “Musical performance in the Diaspora” issue may be very useful. See Tina K. Ramnarine, “Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction” Ethnomusicology Forum 16, no. 1 (June 2007): 1-17. Bart Barendret, “The Sound of 'Longing for Home': Redefining a Sense of Community through Minang Popular Music” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 158, no. 3 (2002): 411-50.