How has the cultural phenomenon of Chinese rock music affected a Chinese academic’s identity and intertwined with wider Chinese society?

Drawing on her travels as a Chinese Rock listener and researcher from mainland China to France, and the UK, author Lei Peng embarks on a journey to understand Chinese Rock as a distinctive cultural phenomenon and ideology, separate to that of the wider rock genre of Western culture.

Along the way, Peng explores how Chinese Rock music has contributed to her integration of a cross-cultural identity, and her identity as a scholar in a predominantly Western academic field. Interrogating Chinese Rock also investigates how this ideology relates and impacts the social-political factors and power structures in Chinese society more broadly across generations.

Examining issues including gender, race, class, consumerism, and patriarchy, this autoethnographic work is ideal reading for higher education students of Cultural Anthropology, Transcultural Studies, Sociology of Music, China Studies, Asian Studies, Women’s Studies, and related courses in the social sciences.

Lei Peng PhD is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Liverpool.