This insightful piece on Chinese culture is brought to you by Professor Budui, self-appointed Sinologist. He has a PhD… in China! Today, he lectures on the death of the King of Pop… and China!
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The King of Pop is gone and his dream—and that of millions of Chinese fans—of a Michael Jackson tour of the Middle Kingdom will never be realized.
Chinese pop fans have always loved Jackson, sticking by him even when much of the rest of the world abandoned him during the child molestation trial. In fact, according to a 2005 sina.com poll, "nearly 87 percent of Chinese people believed that Jackson was innocent and had been unfairly accused of sexual molestation" (Still the 'King of Pop' in China), even as his popularity plummeted in the West.
In all my years teaching in China, I've had many opportunities to discuss Michael Jackson with Chinese students, and in the course of doing so, a few surprising things came up, both about Jackson himself and about his outsized image. (Though where the image begins and where the man himself ends is as impossible to say with precision as it would be to figure out exactly how many nose jobs he's had without direct access to his medical records.)
It's not surprising that Thriller-era Jackson has always been popular with China. When it took the world by storm in 1982, the People's Republic was opening up and new music was finding its way into a China that had been dancing to the soulless tune of Maoist revolutionary propaganda and little else for a decade-plus. Cantopop, Hong Kong stars, American pop and rock—all were making sudden inroads into Chinese youth culture.
And at that time, nobody was bigger anywhere than Michael Jackson. It's fairly safe to say that, for the first generation of Chinese music listeners that emerged from the years defined by continuous replay of "The East is Red" and other government-mandated hits of the Cultural Revolution, Michael Jackson represented the pinnacle of pop expression.
So it's no wonder that today's generation of Chinese "R&B" fans know and revere the post-Thriller Michael. His high-gloss pop with a playful hint of danger wrapped in baby-safe production and delivered with an always non-threatening androgynous nod to "blackness" (increasingly less literal, increasingly conceptual as time went on and MJ's hair straightened, his nose disappeared and his skink, for whatever reason, turned white) that aligns perfectly with the "R&B" popular in China today.
That's not to say Chinese fans don't like Jackson for his hooks, moves and music, ultimately, just like his German or Australian or Japanese fans—it's just to say that there are a few things about the man and the myth that resonate in specific ways within Chinese culture, and that some of the very things about Jackson that helped him break onto an MTV that had, prior to the breakthrough of Thriller, seriously ghettoized African-American music helped him go global, making it big even in China.
I shouldn't have been surprised that nobody knew anything of the Jackson 5 and were unfamiliar with the old black Michael—after all, American culture was anathema to China's cultural overlords during the '60s and '70s, though the theme of American racism was favorite propaganda point at the time. Still, it would have been tricky to square the smiling be-afroed Jackson 5 with the Chinese propagandists' take on Black America at the time (Not that is stopped a Chinese commenter at the time of the child abuse trials, who wrote: “Black people are looked down upon in the U.S. and are unfairly treated” as a simple explanation of why MJ was being run through the media wringer).
On the subject of race, however, the "black Michael vs. white Michael" moment was always one of the most interesting when talking to students, because it dovetails in ways that were surprising to me at first (now, after years in China, nothing's really surprising) about how many younger Chinese people, male and female alike, view issues of skin color, race and the beauty ideal.
Essentially, as anyone who's tried to buy simple skin lotion in China that doesn't promise to "whiten" your skin knows, mainstream Han culture is obsessed with light skin. And as any African or African-American who's hung out in the PRC can probably tell you, many Chinese do have prejudicial notions about black people, despite Cultural Revolution-era propaganda championing African national liberation movements as part of a (largely imagined) global anti-imperialist front.
For most of today's urban Chinese youth, yesterday's avowed solidarity with the wretched of the earth—whether they be sun-darkened Chinese farmers, African-Americans living in the projects or Africans still trying to recover from the legacy of European colonialism (now with lots of Chinese assistance in exchange for raw resources—is a thing of the past. And the mainlining of Western pop culture via DVDs and downloads, combined with China's own growing pop culture (so often modeled on the West, as with Chinese "R&B") has created a mix of misperceptions about America (broadly and deeply racist) and about African-Americans (gangstas, criminals, poor, violent) that is slow to be dispelled, though the recent election of Barack Obama certainly scrambles the racial-perception code.
And as for the fantasies that Western pop culture spins out endlessly (now imitated in so many ways by Chinese pop culture), MJ's image stands still as a testament to the strength of those fantasies, even as his tragic life warns against them. There's the ability of an individual to reinvent him or herself again and again, to stay forever young (MJ as poster boy for Peter Pan syndrome), to be famous or at least look famous (Warhol's 15 minutes times billions thanks to digital and web technology)...
The list goes on, but we're out of time and the Professor has to go lecture at Jiaotong University on why the Green Dam and google block are actually good for freedom, just as soon as he stops sobbing to "Billie Jean," which has been on repeat play on his iPod for the last six hours, even as he has presented this lecture, the first, we hope, of at least two brought to you by ChinaTravel.net, the people's guide to China.