Taiwan Today

In his book Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow: Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Connotations, Marc L. Moskowitz examines the genre of Taiwanese music known as Mandarin pop, or Mandopop. Moskowitz’s book provides valuable insight into notions of gender in Taiwan and East Asia generally. Taiwanese popular music also provides a valuable window on Taiwan’s continuing asymmetrical cultural influence on mainland China, its larger neighbor.

Moskowitz, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina, is an experienced “Taiwan hand” who has lived in Taiwan for more than 10 years since his first trip to the island in 1989, including stints as both a student and researcher. Moskowitz’s research for Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow was comprised mostly of interviews in Taipei and Shanghai of both laypeople and music industry professionals. As the creative center of Mandopop, Taipei plays the larger role with 65 interviews compared with 18 for Shanghai. More than just a book about Taiwanese popular music, Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow is a gift to readers wanting to understand Taiwan’s position in the world and the possibilities for cosmopolitan Chinese-language popular culture to thrive on a transnational stage.

In Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow, Moskowitz dissects the “surprisingly complex cultural implications” of Mandopop. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Taiwanese Mandopop is the genre’s reception in the mainland despite official condemnation by authorities there. Mainland China is on the “periphery” when it comes to the creation of Mandopop, while Taiwan and, to a lesser degree, Hong Kong are at the center. Taiwanese have “created a new musical ethos—a blend of traditional Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Western musical styles that has transformed into something new,” Moskowitz writes. Mandopop is lyric-centered, closer to life and more expressive of feeling than American pop music, according to its listeners.

Moskowitz also considers Taiwan’s cultural invasion of the mainland a “gendered invasion.” Though Taiwan feels political pressure from mainland China, Taiwan sets the standard on a range of tastes in the mainland from fashion and makeup to music, KTV, and conceptions of relationships and womanhood. The central figures of Mandopop are women and men (songwriters/singers) that understand women. Mandopop usually depicts women as “emotional, gentle, and passive victims.” The Mandopop man is vulnerable, non-patriarchal and wenrou (tender). The term wenrou is complex, denoting “charateristics of being caring, sensitive, and ... fairly androgynous.” Wenrou has a different connotation from the overused English term “metrosexual,” which implies narcissism instead of the caring nature of wenrou. Ironically, as mainland China rises to the level of a superpower, its idealized gender roles look more like those of Taiwan. The feminine wins out over the masculine, the yin over the yang.

In the world of Mandopop, men have a wider range of choices than an American male, as seen in the roles of Mandopop superstar Jay Chou (周杰倫), who is both hyper-masculine martial artist and wenrou man. As Moskowitz explains, “the wenrou male should not be seen as lacking masculinity within the context of Mandopop, but rather as possessing characteristics that all men would have if real men could only be so perfect.” At the same time, foreign feminist criticism has not understood Mandopop on its own terms—that of a flexible and well-rounded, rather than ideological, expression of gender.

The current fads of academia all point to Shanghai’s predominance within mainland China. From a Mandopop perspective, Shanghai people are consumers, an eager market for Taiwan-produced music. Despite all of Shanghai’s history and contemporary modernity, Taiwanese Mandopop plays a vitally important role for the mainland’s most cosmopolitan city. As Shanghai sets the tone for mainland China, Taipei sets the tone for Shanghai.

By the 1970s, a Taiwanese musical influence on the mainland became apparent with the songs of Teresa Teng (鄧麗君). Banned from mainland China, along with other Taiwanese artists for being “bourgeois,” a black market in Teng’s recordings thrived. The situation gave rise to the popular saying that Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), the former Chinese Communist Party general secretary, ruled mainland China by day, but “Little Teng” ruled by night. As Moskowitz notes, Teng’s songs “expressed human emotions that had been purged from China’s musical repertoire” during the Cultural Revolution.

Moskowitz gives a perceptive analysis of the role of pirated music in the mainland, where illegal copying can be seen as a creative act, a means to circumvent state censorship. Though piracy and MP3 downloading has hurt Mandopop financially, it has also allowed the genre to become known throughout the mainland.

Mainland China has tried to fight back against what is dubbed Gang-Tai pop, a reference to the origins of this kind of music in Xianggang, which is the name of Hong Kong in Mandarin, and Taiwan. Gang-Tai pop is a declared threat to the national identity and culture of China, where listeners to this unapproved music have even faced arrest. The mainland authorities’ attempts to co-opt the genre’s popularity by forcing the use of nationalistic lyrics to songs like My Chinese Heart or The Great Wall of China is Long, as well as with nationalistic music contests, have failed. Beijing rock; tongsu music or music for the masses; xibeifeng, literally “northwest wind,” which fused folk and modern pop music; and revolutionary disco—all have been presented as patriotic alternatives to Gang-Tai pop and promoted as more authentically Chinese. Yet, PRC listeners have consistently chosen “foreign” Gang-Tai pop music. As Moskowitz notes, Taiwanese pop music “is the voice of China’s modern age.”

Despite the official competition and censorship, Gang-Tai pop remains the most popular genre of music in the mainland, accounting for approximately 80 percent of legal Chinese-language music sales there. While the officially endorsed genres express masculine-nationalist rhetoric associated with the capital, Beijing, Gang-Tai pop better complements the cosmopolitan, wenrou concept of masculinity of Shanghai.

Moskowitz’s chapter titles reinforce the story of cultural influence such as “The Tail Wags the Dog: Taiwan’s Musical Counter-Invasion of China” and “China’s Mandopop Roots and Taiwan’s Gendered Counter-Invasion of the PRC.” Mandopop’s focus on private life and all of its problems is political in the mainland where, officially, public-spiritedness around the communist state has long subsumed individual acts and emotions. Mandopop was a vital transnational influence on the mainland as its economy transformed in the 1980s and 1990s. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow traces the recent history of popular music in Taiwan, but also points to the possibility of Taiwan’s further influence on the mainland in matters of culture and society.

Starring Role for KTV

Moskowitz traces the role that KTV (karaoke TV) has played in the evolution of Mandopop. KTV songs need to be relatively easy to sing, and the KTV setting gives customers an opportunity to act out gendered identities. Traditional etiquette makes speaking directly about one’s emotions or experiences difficult, for example, but as anyone who has seen the sometimes-dramatic performances would attest, KTV provides a venue for Taiwanese to act out roles in public that would never be seen in daily life.

Mandopop, like many aspects of Taiwan, exhibits a cosmopolitan richness and a diversity of inspirations. Taiwan’s local production of popular culture entertainment includes an extremely wide variety of sources and merges Japanese, Chinese and American inspirations. Mandopop artists frequently use foreign melodies but introduce Mandarin lyrics with sometimes very different themes than those of the original songs. Moskowitz compares Mandopop innovation with American originals, for example, and demonstrates that localized versions usually replace more optimistic themes with heartbreak. Authenticity comes not from translation, but from the degree to which a song “can speak to listeners’ experiences.”

Mandopop’s appeal to both local (Taiwan) and regional (South Korea and mainland China) audiences is illustrative of the peculiarities of Taiwan’s hybrid culture: “The hyper-hybridity of Mandopop could only have developed in an intensely transnational culture such as Taiwan, in which boundaries of urban/rural, past/present, and outsider/insider are constantly shifting. Paradoxically, it is precisely this hybrid transnationality that defines Taiwan’s local culture,” Moskowitz writes.

The most popular music in the mainland, and possibly the world, could only have developed in Taiwan with its open society, Chinese traditions and ability to borrow, and adapt, foreign modes of popular culture. Taiwan’s Mandopop has open borders and shows a willingness to incorporate foreign-born artists, including Singapore’s Stefanie Sun (孫燕姿), who is considered by most people on the island as “Taiwanese.”

Within Taiwan, Mandopop has faced competition from Taiyupop, or Taiwanese-language pop. The Taiyupop-Mandopop difference is telling of Taiwanese regionalism and generational differences as Taiwanese is commonly spoken among older generations of Holo, the largest Han group in Taiwan, and in more traditional communities such as those in rural areas, especially in southern Taiwan. As Moskowitz explains, “listening to pop music in Taiwan aligns the listener on several axes ... young vs. old, urban vs. rural, global vs. local, modernity vs. tradition, and middle class/elite vs. poor.”

Mandopop speaks to the feelings of loneliness and isolation in modern Chinese urban society. Moskowitz contends that the greater group orientation of Taiwanese/Chinese culture provokes a reaction of anomie: “The sorrow expressed in Mandopop can be seen as an eloquent expression of the grief of the age.” Comparative analysis of Taiwanese and American pop shows loneliness to be the central concern in Mandopop, but much less common in American music. Mandopop embraces modernity “while simultaneously insisting that we remind ourselves of our own humanity through singing songs of sorrow.”

Moskowitz’s chapter, “Men Writing Songs for Women Who Complain about Men” provides an insightful discussion of the gendered identities of Mandopop music lyrics, most of which are skillfully written by men. Given the demographics of urbanized Taiwan—high divorce rates, prevalence of those never married, and one of the lowest birth rates in the world—one wonders what else Mandopop’s notions of gender, particularly expressions of women’s suffering, tell us. Does the melancholy of Mandopop give any choice but to disengage from the choices of traditional life?

Moskowitz writes that Mandopop listeners would hardly constrain themselves to listening only to that particular genre of music, but might instead choose either American pop music or Mandopop depending on the situation. In fact, he suggests that listeners assign “particular moods and activities to each.” Ordinarily, Mandopop works for KTV and American-style pop for dance clubs. Judging from what one hears on the streets and in shops, language-blind Western hip-hop and dance music might also represent the spirit of Taiwan.

The influence of Taiwan’s Mandopop on mainland China appears to fit the description of what Harvard University professor Joseph Nye describes as “soft power.” Nye’s theory, describing a nation’s ability to influence another nation by means other than economic or military might, is all the rage in the study of international affairs. Though Moskowitz does not refer to Nye’s theory, his consideration of the influence of Taiwanese Mandopop provides a useful study of cultural attraction. Within an East Asian context, the influence of Taiwanese Mandopop gives one of the more concrete examples of cultural influence, particularly considering the asymmetry in size and population between Taiwan and the mainland.

In addition to the world of Mandopop, Taiwan also boasts a thriving “indie” (independent) music scene. In 2010, the Republic of China’s (ROC) Government Information Office provided funding to 16 indie bands to record albums and backed overseas touring as part of the Cultural and Creative Industry Development Act. Some NT$2.1 billion (US$72.4 million) has been earmarked for a five-year Pop Music Flagship Project to support Taiwanese musicians. Seven indie bands were given financial support to attend this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin, Texas and Canadian Music Week in Toronto. Other aspiring bands, including the high-energy Go Chic, who returned to SXSW this year, have already made world tours—an indication of their appeal abroad. These acts, in addition to their artistic merits, give a very different impression from Taiwanese Mandopop, as indie bands generally have a harder, alternative-rock style and frequently use English-language lyrics.

Lost in Translation?

The support for Taiwan’s indie music raises the question of whether aspiring Mandopop acts should receive similar encouragement. If Mandopop has flourished both in Taiwan’s urbanity and freedom, and in mainland China in direct competition with state censorship and state-sponsored music, might it be adaptable to Western audiences, or, would its message be lost in translation? The history of the ROC tells of enduring connections with the world and deftness in cultural diplomatic activity in the face of overwhelming odds. Jay Chou’s entry into Hollywood as co-star of The Green Hornet (2011) hints at the possibility of Taiwan Mandopop’s further incorporation into global popular culture.

Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow is an important book for scholars of East Asian culture, but is also accessible to the general reader who is interested in Taiwanese or Asian pop culture. When giving Chinese terms and lyrics, Moskowitz supplies both translations and Hanyu Pinyin Romanized transcriptions.

Like any thoughtful, scholarly work, Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow raises questions. Though Moskowitz aptly distinguishes between the political/military emphasis of Beijing and the wenrou gender notions of Shanghai, the book might leave the reader curious to know more about Taiwanese regionalism. There is an obvious Taipei-Shanghai axis, but how do the other Taiwanese cities—especially those in southern Taiwan—relate to these Mandopop/gender issues, beyond the obvious competition of Taiyupop? Moskowitz’s recent video documentary on the culture of local Taiwanese temples, Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan (2011) describes a very different standard of masculinity than that presented by Mandopop.

Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow succeeds in explaining the complexity and attraction of Taiwanese popular music. The book tells the story of how Taiwanese popular culture, with its rich hybridity and ability to borrow from disparate traditions, has trumped mainland China’s Sinicized nationalism. A continued reluctance of mainland authorities to acknowledge Gang-Tai pop as a legitimate genre of Chinese music would be telling. Rather than being a threat, Mandopop might provide real examples for an innovative Chinese culture with “soft power” traits. As the mainland grows in wealth and importance, its leaders could learn from Taiwanese popular music of the possibility of creating popular forms of culture that are both cosmopolitan and Chinese.

Joseph Eaton is an assistant professor of history at National Chengchi University in Taipei.

Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Eaton