During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Chinese musicians indigenized global popular genres including rock and electronic dance music in ways that ostensibly reflected “Chineseness” (Yen 2005, Wang 2015), chiefly by including Chinese traditional instruments. In the 1998 experimental electronic album Mountain River, Dou Wei opts for an alternative technique: instead of using Chinese traditional instruments directly, he simulated their sounds electronically. For example, he used synthesizers to simulate the sound of a sheng in the song “Spring in March,” and the sound of a guzheng and dizi in “Green Bamboo Leaves”—a remarkable choice given that Wei is an expert dizi player. Furthermore, Wei deliberately emphasizes the artificial, simulated nature of the instruments by adding an electric buzz to the track and writing flowing melody lines that could not be accomplished by real instruments. Although Wei’s use of simulated rather than direct sounds of the dizi reflects a need to minimize production costs, I argue that it also expands notions of what Chinese music can be; claiming that music with “Chineseness” can be electronically produced. In this paper, I apply Brian Kane’s (2014) framework to examine sounds in a tripartite source, cause, and effect model. I supplement this sonic analysis with liner notes, song lyrics, online comments and news, and personal interviews I conducted with audiences. This research contributes to the study of how musical identities are digitally mediated to create a sonic evocation of 21st-century Chineseeness that both connects to—and separates from—the traditional past.

Northeast China has a distinctive regional cultural identity, marked by the integration of matrilineal nomadic cultures, particularly the Nuzhen, with Chinese Han patriarchy. The presentation takes errenzhuan, the most prevalent traditional folk comprehensive art in Northeast China, as the perspective of exploration. Errenzhuan originated as a form of begging performance in northeastern rural areas, integrated with music, dance, and acrobatic performances. The presentation explores how errenzhuan evolved from a rural begging performance to express and shape the social, gender, and sexual narrative of the Chinese northeastern rural communities, as well as becoming a catalyst for the cohesion and cultural identity of the communities. It also engages with the ancient Chinese yin-yang philosophy to examine the representations of gender roles within errenzhuan as mechanisms for societal transformation and the continuous negotiation of traditional gender expectations. Additionally, within the context of northeast China’s former industrial stronghold, the presentation examines how errenzhuan serves as a manifestation of the tension between grassroots cultural practices and the prevailing official culture, negotiating between tradition and innovation. The study endeavors to address the existing gap in Western academic research on errenzhuan and augment the scholarly dialogue within Chinese ethnomusicology. Specifically, it seeks to illuminate the underexplored areas of errenzhuan performance practices and their cultural significance, contributing to a better understanding of global music traditions and the specificities of Chinese musical heritage.

This paper explores how the theatre of a Chinese regional opera as an actor and embodied-knowledge-making process enunciates stories, ideals, operations, and imaginaries of local communities. Meanwhile, it problematizes the stereotype of Chinese opera theatres as “static sites” by unfolding how theatres constantly resonate with individuals through converging personal stories, activities, memories, demands, and desires to the very place. The materialities and material presence of theatres ensure the continuities of cultural activities of traditional xiqu in Chinese society today. As one of the regional operatic genres, Shandong lüju opera was involved in the national xiqu-campaign reform (the 1950s) and cultural heritagization (the 2000s) of the P.R.C.In this aspect, the institutionalized-opera activities have molded the xiqu theatres toward an “enduring site” for constantly revamping regional cultures into the rubrics of national culture and memories coherently. However, to the lüju communities, the lüju theatre intertwines with pluralistic stories and embodied meanings in their quotidian practices. As theatre-going audiences, they participate in recirculating the theatrical things and onstage/offstage actions, facilitating embodied knowledge to carve the contours of the group identity and imaginaries as a whole. Drawing on the ethnographic observations of the Lüju Baihua Theatre, this paper illustrates that Chinese xiqu theatres traffic the shared past, multigenerational narrations, and regional stories through resonating with the local communities. Taken together, it explores the perception of theatres as cultural activities and memory sites that always facilitate connective memories, regional knowledge, and personal stories in Chinese societies.