Shidaiqu Nostalgia

by Andrew Chan

For most contemporary listeners, classic Mandarin pop music (aka Mandopop) may be most interesting as a reflection of the seismic social and political changes that rocked the Chinese-speaking world in the 20th century. After all, nothing captures the cosmopolitanism and westernization of turn-of-the-century Shanghai, and that intoxicating feeling of a great city stepping into a new era, more vividly than the jazz and mambo-inflected shidaiqu of the 1920s and 30s, which guitarist Gary Lucas reimagines in his album and live show The Edge of Heaven.

It’s important, though, to remember that these songs carry so much emotional weight for several generations of Chinese audiences precisely because of their lack of social consciousness. These songs are intimate, romantic, and luxurious to listen to—qualities that rendered them unforgivably bourgeois in the eyes of the Communist government, which began shutting down nightclubs and record companies in the 1950s.

When you hear the birdlike tones of a brilliant vocalist like Zhou Xuan, or the alternately sensuous and abrasive alto of Bai Guang, you can understand why these songs are now the object of intense, fetishistic nostalgia. While shidaiqu continued to have an enormous influence on Chinese pop outside of the mainland (particularly in Taiwan, where the legendary Teresa Teng became the principal inheritor of the music’s unabashedly sentimental style), the PRC went through several decades in which nationalistic and propagandistic anthems completely dominated the music culture.

Shanghai in Next Wave—From Dragon to Heaven

by David Hsieh

Tai Wei Foo and Robert Lepage in The Blue Dragon. Photo: Louise Leblanc

Robert Lepage directs and acts in The Blue Dragon; his character Pierre is a Canadian expat living in present-day Shanghai. In The Edge of Heaven, Gary Lucas reinterprets Chinese pop songs created in 1930s Shanghai. Both shows filter this major Eastern metropolis through Western eyes—befitting, as the history of Shanghai is closely intertwined with the Western presence in China.

Situated at the mouth of the Yangtze River in the middle of China’s coastline, Shanghai’s strength lies in its ocean-facing harbor. But China didn’t have much use of it before the 18th century since the major north-south shipping route was the Great Canal linking the Yellow and Yangtze rivers inland. And except for some isolated periods, China was not a sea-faring empire.

That changed in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanjing, after the British “fire-spewing ships” streamed up the Yangtze River and forced China to open five ports for trading, including Shanghai. Although not a sleepy fishing village like Hong Kong, which China ceded in the same treaty, Shanghai, by Chinese standards, was not a major city (its official status was a level below) nor a historical one. It had a population of about 200,000. The city wall, built 300 years earlier, measured only three miles in circumference. The landscape was as flat as a piece of cardboard and prone to flooding. But acting on the advice of William Jardine, a ship physician turned opium merchant turned parliament member, London decided this would be the base for its future operation in China. Modern Shanghai was born.