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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music

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Discourses of Race and Rising China

Part of the book series: Mapping Global Racisms ((MGR))

Abstract

Through timely accommodating the ideological agenda of the Chinese state both domestically and internationally, patriotic songs have played a significant role in contemporary Chinese nationalism. The music genre contributed a number of racialized concepts about Chinese identity and Chinese history to contemporary China’s nationalist politics, as well as a set of highly effective idioms that address these concepts, a form of popular appeal and mass mobilization in a seemingly spontaneous and innocent manner, and finally, a mechanism through which the party-state deftly tames and exploits power of capitalist cultural production and market for ideological education. An introduction to and an analysis of this pop music genre provides a particular prism through which the dynamics and intensity of contemporary Chinese nationalism can be better understood as an interaction between the politics of reconstructing the national identity and the origination and popularization of a racial discourse.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The “four cardinal principles” refers to the unchallengeable status of Marxism, socialism, the party’s leading role, and the dictatorship of the proletariat in governing China’s ideology and politics, proposed by Deng Xiaoping, the de facto paramount leader in 1979.

  2. 2.

    The scholarship involving pop music and contemporary Chinese nationalism is represented by Baranovitch (2005) and Kloet (2010). Neither of them discussed racial thinking in pop music as a major subject, nor was the role of Gangtai patriotic songs in Chinese nationalism mentioned. In works dealing with contemporary Chinese nationalism in general, the topic of racism in popular culture is either missing or is involved only marginally.

  3. 3.

    Although Deng Lijun or Terasa Teng was the most popular Taiwanese singer (with tapes and records disseminated in the mainland) in the mainland from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, she never set foot on the mainland due to her pro-Taiwan position. She was known for her enthusiasm in singing Taiwanese patriotic songs and for performing for the Taiwanese army. Deng died in 1995.

  4. 4.

    In 1981, representing Taiwanese youth, Hou visited a UN refugee camp on the Thailand border for ethnic Chinese who had been victims of the Khmer Rouge. Hou led the refugees to sing “Descendants of the Dragon” and hoped that a great number of them could be brought to Taiwan, but it turned out that Taiwan took fewer than ten to the island. This was the event that forced Hou to realize Taiwan’s limit in representing China and protecting Chinese people internationally. See Hou (1991, pp. 40–41).

  5. 5.

    Because China at the time had not joined the International Copyright Protection organization, Huang Bingheng, the mastermind of the song’s creation and the owner of Wing Hang Record Trading Co. Ltd, which held the song’s copyright, could not make any profit from the Chinese market despite the song’s significant success in the mainland. Not only that, Huang quickly realized that the song’s pro-mainland content could negatively affect his market share in Taiwan. He never contracted Zhang Mingmin for any such performances. Huang Zhan, the lyricist, simply forgot about the song until two years later when he ran into Zhang Mingmin, who told him of the song’s popularity in the mainland. Huang complained to Zhang that he had not received a penny from China and jokingly asked Zhang to get some royalties for him from China. It is believed that years later, after China joined the International Copyright Protection organization, Huang received some compensation.

  6. 6.

    The market success of this song inspired the lyric writer and composer to create yet another song with the more concise title of “The Yellow.” The lyric basically repeats the phrase “The Yellow Race”.

  7. 7.

    《龙的传人》- 侯德健 李建复, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEUCqDDZRQs.

  8. 8.

    Other than “My Chinese Heart,” the patriotic songs either created by Zhang himself or which became popular in China due to his performances include “I Am Chinese,” “Roots and Arteries,” “We Possess a Name ‘Chinese’,” “Give You One Handful of Earth,” “Palm and Back of Your Hand,” “the Youth, the Chinese Heart,” “The Chinese Nation,” “The Same Kind of Chinese,” and “The Beautiful Chinese”.

  9. 9.

    Some examples of such songs created between the 1950s and the 1970 include “The Liberated Tibetan Peasant-Slaves Sing Songs” (翻身农奴把歌唱), “Miao Villages Now Have Railroads” (火车修进苗家寨), “On Beijing’s Golden Mountains” (在北京的金山上 a Tibetan folk song), and “A Never-Setting Red Sun on the Prairie” (草原上升起不落的太阳, a Mongol folk song). The latter two both liken Mao to the red sun.

  10. 10.

    The Chinese characters in the song’s title and lyrics denoting the Chinese people are huang, zhong, and ren (yellow, race, and people, respectively). In his article, Chow chose to translate them as “yellow people,” omitting the second character. In the context of the entire lyrics, I think “yellow race” is a more accurate translation.

  11. 11.

    Qinshihuangdi was the founder of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), the first centralized empire in Chinese history. A notorious tyrant, he mobilized the population to build his tomb when he was alive and allegedly buried all the laborers upon its completion to keep the construction secret.

  12. 12.

    One personal anecdote may illustrate this impression. When I was printing out the English translation of the song’s lyrics in my department’s copying room, one of my African-American colleagues passed by. Upon glimpsing the lyrics, he murmured “a story of Chinese indentured labor?” I was confused by his response, but as I read the lyrics again, I quickly realized why he had this impression.

  13. 13.

    Wang’s uncle, Cho-yun Hsu, is an influential Chinese historian with numerous honors and titles and is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh.

  14. 14.

    For example, one middle-aged woman submitted a poem for a song titled “Glorious Torchbearer” in which she wrote: “I am a glorious torchbearer, one of those descendants of the Dragon … black eyes and black hair, my forever pride” Mei (2008).

  15. 15.

    In Japan, however, such a sentimentalized wartime culture eventually concerned the authorities. As Dower put it, “the molders of public sentiment deemed it necessary to toughen up patriotic spirit by encouraging more specifically anti-Anglo-American songs. Thus in April 1943 a nationwide competition was announced for a ‘lively, sturdy tune’ with the tempo of a march. The prescribed title was ‘Down with British and American’” (Dower, p. 214).

  16. 16.

    For example, when Roger Yonchien Tsien, a Chinese-American scientist, won the Nobel prize for physics in 2008, he was asked several times by Chinese journalists in news conferences about the implications of his success to China and Chinese scientists, even after he expressed confusion caused by such questions and insisted that he was an American. Gary Locke, the US ambassador to China between 2011 and 2013, is a second-generation Chinese-American. With the Chinese name of Luo Jiahui, he looks perfectly like a Han Chinese in the eyes of many Chinese people. Since his nomination, speculation on “how much is he still a Chinese” have bothered numerous Chinese netizens. After living in Beijing, Locke seemed to get used to such a perception and began to use it for public relations purposes. His long interview with a major Chinese popular history journal was titled “Luo Jiaohui: My Chinese Heart” (Locke2012).

  17. 17.

    An example in this case is Wen Yiduo (闻一多 1899–1946), a very popular poet between the 1920s and 1940s, who wrote a poem titled “I Am a Chinese.” An influential piece often quoted in patriotic education as an example of patriotic literature before 1949, it was written during the time that Wen was an overseas Chinese student. It heralded Gangtai patriotic songs in two ways. One is that the poem contains some lines with racial connotations echoed in Gangtai patriotic songs, although it is difficult to determine whether the latter’s lyricists were aware of them. The poem includes lines such as “I am Chinese, I am Chinese, I am the divine blood of the yellow Emperor … my race is like the Yellow River.” The poem is now available online on many education websites (the translation is taken from Dikötter 1992, p. 362). The other is that the patriotic sentiments in the poem are expressed against a biographical background: a Chinese student in a foreign country longing for his motherland.

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  1. Delaware State University, Dover, DE, USA

    Yinghong Cheng

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Cheng, Y. (2019). Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music. In: Discourses of Race and Rising China. Mapping Global Racisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_2

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05356-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05357-4

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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