Contenu du sommaire : Sinophone Musical Worlds (2): The Politics of Chineseness

While the popularity of China Wind (zhongguofeng 中國風) music during the 2000s has waned somewhat since its peak, the notion of Chineseness in popular music requires reconfiguration. In the world of popular music, transnational flows of culture, migration, and capital have created various forms of Chineseness with different functions. This article examines two ways in which the perception of Chineseness functions in the music industry, namely as a re-centred Chineseness in the creative industries, and Chineseness as a globalising project, by examining the internationally franchised televised music contest The Voice of China and the recent work of two artists known for their China Wind songs, Jay Chou and Wang Leehom. Through textual analysis of media content and songs, as well interviews with industry practitioners, this article argues that Chineseness in today's Chinese popular music is often shaped by markets, industrial practices, media censorship, state policy, and cross-industry convergence, and musicians' artistry increasingly plays a part in forming and authorising the representation of Chineseness in contemporary Chinese popular music.

This article explores Archaic Wind music (gufeng 古風) and its implications for Sinophone articulations. Gufeng can be categorised as a particular type of music with lyrical, musical, and symbolic references to ancient China that is produced, consumed, and circulated within an online fan community. While the lyrics of gufeng music express a post-loyalist yearning to return to the fictional roots of “Cultural China,” its video adaptations deconstruct the authenticity of such cultural roots in their homoerotic subtext. Exploring the audio-visual texts of the gufeng music, I suggest that it shows a rhizomatic return to ancient China that disorients the routes to the past.

Although the case of “censorship” of Chinese hip-hop in January 2018 has led to extensive news coverage in the international press, it does not account for the multiple forms of musical censorship that exist in contemporary China. This article draws on observations from within the punk rock community to outline how censorship works in practice and which institutions are responsible for overseeing musical productions, from the release of albums to the management of concerts and festivals. This overview of censorship mechanisms in the Chinese music scene – including self-censorship required to release albums domestically – will highlight how to circumvent censorship, as well as the extent to which it is possible for artists to negotiate with the authorities.

This paper examines the duration of time in everyday life as depicted in Jia Zhangke's 贾樟柯 second feature film, Platform 站台 (Zhantai) (2000). In light of the Bergsonian notion of time and Deleuze's creative application of this notion in the realm of cinema, it demonstrates how the duration of time – the core of the experience of waiting depicted in the film – is brought out in the film's narrative structure, cinematic devices, and acting style. Fundamental to the film's creative endeavour is the attempt to capture the resistance of the present moment against the weight of its own virtual double, which is to say, to unearth the gaps and lacunae that lie beneath the temporal continuum assumed in our habitual way of living. On the basis of this particular vision of time, the film offers a critique of everyday life as the very site where the platitude of existing norms of culture is laid bare and where the unbearable pressure of time forces us to question the value of all existing possibilities.

Since 2011, freight transport rail links between China and Europe have been rapidly multiplying. Against all expectations, this commercial initiative, under the aegis of the Deutsche Bahn, has expanded significantly. The number of origin-destination pairs has increased, the number of trains has risen sharply, and both Chinese and European partners have far-reaching ambitions. The railways' market share of trans-Asian freight is still low. However, rail link development projects have received a spectacular boost from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), resulting in the rapid expansion of volume, services offered, and the emergence of new rail infrastructure. Does this development, which needs to be examined more closely, represent a political tool for China? To what extent does the development of these rail links rely on a buoyant market? This article studies the development of rail services and infrastructure by means of a cross-analysis of a body of technical reports and publications by the transport sector's professional press.