Alternative music in China today

Another much played song tries even harder to soothe. "Ah, little man, ah, succeed quickly," it counsels. "Enjoy being poor but happy every day."

Marxists once referred to religion as the opium of the people, but in today's China it is the music promoted on state-monopolised radio that increasingly claims that role. China's leader, Hu Jintao, has talked since he assumed power five years ago about "building a harmonious society," an ambiguous phrase subject to countless interpretations. But Chinese musicians, cultural critics and fans say that in entertainment, the government's thrust seems clear: Harmonious means blandly homogeneous, with virtually all contemporary music on the radio consisting of gentle love songs and uplifting ballads.

In recent weeks, television networks have come under intense pressure from Beijing to purge their programming of crime reports and even mildly suggestive sexual references. Variety show producers are subject to new rules aimed at enforcing official notions of dignity. Art galleries and theatrical productions, meanwhile, have always been subject to review by censors.

Fu Guoyong, an independent cultural critic in Hangzhou, likened today's pop music culture to the politically enforced conformity of the Cultural Revolution, when only eight highly idealised Socialist "model operas" could be performed in China. "Nowadays singers can sing many songs, but in the end, they're all singing the same song, the core of which is, 'Have fun,'" Fu said. "Culture has become an empty vessel."

Nowhere is conformity enforced more vigorously than on broadcast radio, where pop music programmes are saturated with the Chinese equivalent of the kind of easy listening often associated in other countries with elevators and dentists' offices.

Rock 'n' roll is mostly limited to special programmes that are allowed brief windows of airtime during the graveyard shift, and even then there are few hints of angst, alienation or any but the very mildest expressions of teenage rebellion. Rock enjoyed a wave of popularity in China in the early 1990s, but the works of the country's most famous performer, Cui Jian, disappeared from the airwaves around that time because, many fans believe, his lyrics began to flirt with political themes. By this year, the rock groups felt so unwanted that when the Chinese Olympic Committee called on musicians to submit songs for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, virtually none stepped forward, according to Shen Lihui, a music company executive who was consulted by the committee.

Liu Sijia, the bass player and a vocalist for an underground Shanghai band called Three Yellow Chicken, said alternative music in China today is much like Western rock in the 1960s, with its frequent references to social issues like war, poverty, civil rights and generational conflict. But alternative rock is rarely heard on the radio.

Chinese cultural officials and radio DJ's insist that the overwhelming prevalence of easy-listening pop merely reflects popular tastes. Many point to a commonly invoked generational shift in China, with today's young people too caught up in the country's economic boom to dwell on social problems or ponder life's bigger questions.

Critics of the country's cultural policies acknowledge that compared with past practices, direct censorship of popular music is relatively uncommon. But in comments that hinted at the political agenda behind the state's management of popular music, Zhang Zhuyi, an official of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, said he doubted that a radio station dedicated to rock 'n' roll would be allowed in China.