Fang Hao doesn't look like a hooligan. The polite, soft-spoken 22 year old photography student seems just like any other young Shanghainese: he lives with his parents, and gets along with them but feels they don't understand him. He worries about girls and grades and what to do after graduation. He faces challenges shared with college-educated young urbanites all over China: questions of developing individual identity and self-respect in a still collective society, and of reconciling Chinese values with the Western culture on which they were weaned.

     To many of his elders, though, and even to some government officials, young Shanghainese like Fang Hao present a dilemma beyond youth alienation. By dint of mere musical tastes, a decade ago they could be arrested for "hooliganism". Now, while the term itself has become outdated, young rock musicians and their followers continue to be suspiciously viewed as representatives of a dangerously decadent lifestyle, but the real danger they pose is as expressions of a growing tide of individualism.

     For youth in Shanghai today, rock'n'roll represents rebellion, yes, but of a social, cultural, and psychological, rather than political, vein. While the city government has occasionally impeded the development of the indigenous music scene, most of the time it has taken an indifferently hands-off approach. Shanghai rock's greatest obstacle has come from a widespread popular perception that it represents a corrupting, unhealthy strain of Western decadence.

     The concept of Chinese rock'n'roll has since its inception been a Beijing monopoly in the minds of both its local fans and foreign observers. While other Chinese urban centers have long had their own smattering of original bands and hard-core followers, most have scarcely managed to register on the cultural radar of their home city, let alone nationwide. Shanghai was no exception. Recently, however, as the grunge and punk of industrial cities like Wuhan, Guangzhou, Kunming, and Chengdu have started to earn some national repute, the Westernized, modern, and relatively prosperous port of Shanghai has produced a music scene known for its bourgeois, Brit-pop based sophistication.

     Two years ago, even the most culturally savvy Shanghai resident would question whether the city had a rock scene. Now, with regular concerts in high-profile venues, increased media coverage, and an explosion in the number and visibility of local bands, groups such as Zen, Honeys, and Crystal Butterfly have attracted large followings and even larger reputations. Crystal Butterfly has signed with Beijing indy label New Bees Music, and will be departing to the capital shortly to record

their debut album, which is expected to set a precedent for other Shanghai bands. Meanwhile, a dozen or so defiantly underground punk and metal bands, scoffing at the popularity of their better-known rivals, continue to jam in obscure locations to dedicated gatherings of the highly pierced.

     A youth subculture has emerged around the Shanghai music scene, mingling musicians and fans, artists and writers, idealistic students and alienated white-collar drones. There's plenty of hip posturing, creative hairstyles, garish tattoos, and bad attitude to be seen. Enthusiastic verbal abuse is the norm, constantly cursing the government, pop music, Beijing rock music, bars with bad sound systems, and rival Shanghai bands. There is, however, little evidence of the vices that rock'n'roll is so commonly associated with: drug use and casual sex are minimal in the Shanghai rock scene.

     More dedicated rockers complain that rock, for many newcomers, increasingly represents a popular means of seeming hip and entertaining oneself, with music of decreasing importance. "It's become trendy, even," said Fang Hao. "A lot of guys will start bands just to look cool and pick up chicks." But for poseurs and hard-core musicians alike, rock music represents an outlet to and form of resistance against social expectations.

     China's urban youth are starting to search for something more meaningful than the materialistic ambitions that have been handed to them by their parents and mainstream society. Rock music has always represented values of youth rebellion, defiance of authority, and celebration of individuality, innovation and even desolation - and it is no different here.

     The Shanghai government has never actively suppressed the local music scene; rather its crimes have been of omission. Until recently, official performance permits were rarely granted for rock concerts, although small, unauthorized performances could be and often were held with impunity. More important, though, in the minds of musicians and chroniclers of the music scene, is the de facto ban on covering alternative music in the local media, which operates under state auspices.

     Sun Mengjing, a program editor for Shanghai Eastern TV Station's music department and known as the "Godfather of Shanghai Rock" for his groundbreaking radio show, says there's never been any explicit rule prohibiting the coverage of rock music. Particularly on television, though, there has long an implicit understanding that use of the term yaogun, or rock'n'roll, and depiction of men with long hair are ill-advised.

     "The government's attitude is that 'Cultural and Art exist to serve the government prerogatives,'" explained Fang Hao. "So, for example, when the government's promoting economic development, you get stuff like 'Development Art' and 'Development Music.' The media only covers what the government deems to be good, and just ignores everything else."

     But according to Sun Mengjing, the absence of coverage of both international and local rock music, he adds, was never due to the government so much as because, "the reporters, the editors, the people in charge of culture have a personal dislike of rock, and prefer Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop."

     The slow pace at which the media is becoming more open to rock music was evidenced earlier this year when Beijing rock group Catcher in the Rye won a music award in Shanghai. On the televised awards show, the punk band was described as a "pop group" and was not allowed to perform live, only lip-sync.

     "Shanghai's problem is part of China's north-south dichotomy," explained Fei Qiang, a music critic and radio producer who has followed the development of Shanghai's rock scene since its inception. "Northern Chinese like things such as music to be lively, noisy and chaotic. Southerners like things smooth, peaceful, and pretty. Chinese rock so far has followed the northern aesthetic, and as a result Shanghainese assume that all rock is like that." Younger audiences, who give little thought to rock's ill-repute as "hooligan music", often continue to write it off as "noisy music".

     Disapproval from the older generation, too, is fading. Musicians in their late 20s, who were ostracized by their families when they decided to pick up a guitar and grow out their hair, wax enviously effusive about the parental support enjoyed by rockers just a few years younger. While it may not represent a greater understanding of music, it does signify a healthy open-mindedness towards the new vagaries of youth.

     Increasingly, the alternative sensibilities of rock culture are gathering mainstream appeal, but it's hard to tell whether it answers a wider craving for self-defined life or is merely a veneer of individualism proffered by an ever more savvy Chinese marketing industry. Long, dyed hair on men, and shirts emblazoned with the underground's patron saints, Kurt Cobain and Che Guevera, have expanded from the enclave of concerts to become a tour de force even on Huaihai Road, the city's fashion-obsessed shopping stretch. Yet whether these youngsters represent the substance of revolution or merely the trappings, the potential power of music to shake up society has yet to be fully unleashed in China, and when it is, it may well alter the face of a budding generation.

Asian Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2001