To Örebro University

In the interviews with Chinese punk participants, it is frequent to hear the narratives of punk’s magical and powerful force, one which helps them through hardship, enables them to stick to themselves, encourages them to fight for changes, and lifts them up when they have been knocked down by reality. Actually, since being imported to mainland China in the mid-1990s, punk subculture has not only endowed its Chinese participants with resilience, but also been demonstrating resilience within the fast-growing Chinese context.

In this presentation, Yiren hopes to expound the meanings of Chinese punk subculture, especially around the theme of resilience; and how these meanings are shaped by individual participants under the impact of the Chinese context. More specifically, the conclusions will be unfolded through threefold meanings in terms of individual, contextual and musical perspectives. For individual meanings, punk is practiced as an approach to authenticity. Chinese participants employ punk to express authentic individual thoughts, construct subjective identification, and reflect on the mainstream such as Chinese pop music, collectivism and patriarchy. For contextual meanings, Chinese participants use punk to resist Western stereotypes and adapt to Chinese cultural censorship. At last for musical meanings, punk empowers participants through a positive and protective power. Punk music provides a model for behaviour and spurs participants to action through the process of listening and performing. In these processes, punk music helps participants to withstand and survive struggles, activating a set of capacities of resilience.

By exploring the meanings of punk subculture from different perspectives in the Chinese context, this presentation tries to approach Chinese punk as a porous subculture, instead of employing a frequently-used Western theoretical framework that overemphasises Chinese punk’s political resistance and imposes an “oppression-resistance” agenda. Only in this way, local cultural phenomena can gain open and new meanings.