Contenu du sommaire : Sinophone Musical Worlds (1)

This essay looks into the cultural identity and acoustic experience shared among Canton, Hong Kong, and Macau through “The Song of Selling Olives,” a piece from Siu Yuet Pak – a 1950 Cantonese opera adaptation of Flame of Lust , a 1948 story broadcasted in Canton (as Guangzhou was known in the Republican era) that soon become a household name across the region. By means of archival research and close-reading, I will explicate ways in which the song appropriates the cultural icon of Siu Yuet-pak and re-invents the tradition of “selling olives,” projecting the boundary-crossing experience among the three Cantonese-speaking areas in a time of frequent exchanges, occasional competition, and potential disconnection from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.

In February 2019, two major musical performances by residents of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region were widely circulated on Chinese social media. These two performances, one a Mekit County Harvest Gala and the other a performance by a Uyghur school teacher from Qumul, featured Uyghurs dressed in Han cultural costumes performing Beijing Opera. Over the past five years, since the “People's War on Terror” started, the space for Uyghur traditional song and dance performance has deeply diminished. Simultaneously, the space for Uyghurs performing Hanness through Chinese traditional opera and Red songs has dramatically increased. Drawing on open source Uyghur and Chinese-language media, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews with Uyghurs in diaspora, this article analyses the changing role of music in Uyghur religious and ritual life by tracing the way state cultural ministries have dramatically increased their attempts to separate Uyghur music from its Sufi Islamic origins in order to produce a non-threatening “permitted difference” (Schein 2000). Since 2016, the re-education campaign of the Chinese government on Uyghur society has intensified this disconnection by promoting an erasure of even the state-curated “difference” of happy, exoticized Uyghurs on stage. Han traditional music is now replacing Uyghur traditional music, which shows an intensification of symbolic violence toward Uyghur traditional knowledge and aesthetics. In a time of Uyghur re-education, musical performance on stage has become a space for political rituals of loyalty to a Han nationalist vision of the Chinese state.

The Shanghai Conservatory of Music has as its principal mission the production of world class performers of “Western classical music” through a highly competitive training programme. This process of “globalisation” involves measures that are more explicit and more developed than in European or North American conservatories. The apparent absence of culturally-specific differences in this globalised model is more subtle than meets the eye, however. The globalisation is only partial, targeted, and above all accompanied by a form of appropriation involving two distinct mechanisms: the one devoted to the development and transmission of a standardised international performance technique, and the other concerned with the composition of pieces with particular Chinese characteristics, putting a nationalist discourse into music.

Through examining the Chinese remake of the Korean television program I Am a Singer , I explore the questions of how a Chinese musical television reality show performs and represents the newly rising aesthetic demands for de-territorialising what I term the “lingualscape,” the shifting landscape of languages intermingled with and liberated from standardised national languages; and how it interplays with affective negotiation in the practices of translation or transplantation within the context of cultural de-territorialisation. This Sino-Korean musical TV program demonstrates nonethnic-centred imaginings across national and state-sanctioned ideological boundaries. The lingualscape performs affective negotiation and rises above the official lingual system, a process through which sincere communication becomes possible in a digital time.

This article draws on the film Ten Years Taiwan (2018) to identify three side-lined yet pressing issues that contemporary Taiwanese society has to address: the dilemma of multiculturalism, the preservation of traditions, and the status of historical memory. Unlike Hong Kong's Ten Years (2015), which focuses on political and cultural tensions between China and Hong Kong, Ten Years Taiwan emphasises the everyday experiences of different groups of people in Taiwan, such as aborigines, migrant workers, and those living in the countryside. Through the lived experiences of these populations, while indirectly addressing related political problems, Ten Years Taiwan challenges its audiences to reconceptualise the meaning of a “Taiwanese” society, prompting questions on how Taiwan as a society should proceed.

Participatory governance has become a mode of governance around the world since the 1990s, including in non-democratic contexts. Since November 2002, the notion of participatory governance has indeed been appropriated by the Chinese authorities after the 16th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Since 2010, numerous experiments in participatory governance have been implemented in China, from participatory budgeting to participatory planning. This essay studies the specific development of participatory governance in China through the role of urban planners. It will first discuss the context of the development of public participation at local levels, while analysing the emergence of participatory planning and its implications. Furthermore, it will analyse the role of planners in participatory planning. Then, it will focus on the transformation of local governance, especially in the case of community governance. In the final sections, the article will discuss planner-mediated participation and reflect on more academic thoughts on the model. It will conclude with a discussion on Chinese participative experiments.

Hanmai 喊麥, literally “shouting [at] a microphone,” first came to public attention and scrutiny as a distinct sound gaining both popularity and notoriety in 2015, when livestreaming platforms such as YY (which launched as a voice chat client in 2008) were growing exponentially. Contemporary hanmai is therefore predominantly associated with livestreaming media.2 However, its origin can be traced much further back. The sound culture can be linked to the broader context of market reform and the emergence of disco music in the 1990s, as well as to the evolution of Northeastern (Dongbei 東北) folk culture during the same period. Dongbei spoken word art has fundamentally shaped the lyrical structure and presentation of hanmai , while its lyrical content has shifted over time from a dance culture filled with hedonist desires in the late 1990s and early 2000s to a contemporary livestreaming culture of venting frustration due to unfulfilled desires. Moreover, socio-technologically speaking, hanmai culture started in the form of commercial sales of pirate mixtape CDs, then migrated to QQzone (Tencent's version of personal webspace similar to Myspace) throughout the 2000s, re-invented itself via Internet subculture on early video portals such as Acfun as well as popular web fiction, and finally (re)emerged on YY as the contemporary reiteration of hanmai . This paper aims to map a genealogy of hanmai, including the divergences, parallels, and reiterations of this specific style of sound in Chinese societ from the 1990s onwards.