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Since the 1990s, there has been dense traffic of pop culture routinely crossing the national and cultural boundaries of East Asian countries of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The unequal traffic is predominantly from Japan and Korea into ethnic-Chinese dominant locations, which has a historically long and well established production, distribution and exhibition network; Japan and Korea are primarily production-exporting nations, while China and Singapore as primarily importing-consumption ones, with Taiwan emerging as the production centre in Mandarin pop music and Hong Kong remaining as the primary production location of Chinese languages cinemas. Japanese and Korean pop culture are translated, dubbed or subtitled into a Chinese language in one of the ethnic-Chinese importing locations and then re-exported and circulated within the entire Chinese ‘diaspora’. The structures and processes that engender this transnational flow are the foundational to the emergence of an East Asian regional media cultural economy that increasingly see co-production of films and television dramas.

Garbage in Taiwan is at the center of a musical assemblage that resonates beyond the waste collection soundscape. Taiwanese garbage trucks are musical: Badarzewska's Maiden's Prayer or Beethoven's För Elise announce the brigade's arrival at designated times and pick up locations. Neighbors stream into the street for a turn at depositing their presorted waste into the proper receptacles. Taiwan's semi-tropical climate combined with a densely situated human population, and the presence of well-established rat and cockroach populations, combine to make garbage management a matter of daily urgency. This chapter takes Taiwan's pop music, primarily Mandopop, from the early 1980s through the mid-2010s as evidence of ways in which everyday practices aimed at dealing sustainably with household waste have seeped into a wide range of sensibilities.

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the range of cultural connotations of Taiwan-produced Mandopop in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. While less threatening to the PRC state than the overt sexuality and celebration of consumerism expressed in American pop, Taiwan has served to export a transnational musical ethos that is remarkably radical compared with the state-controlled music industry in the PRC. Taiwan's counter-invasion has profoundly influenced on PRC culture: it has (re) introduced images of women as emotional, gentle, and passive victims; offered a wider range of male identities; ushered in individualist ideologies and a globalized consumer culture; and provided a space to talk about human emotions such as loneliness and sorrow that have traditionally been highly discouraged by both the government and traditional cultural mores. Themes of urbanization, the shift to a capitalist infrastructure, the breakdown of traditional values, and an increasing sense of a social and moral vacuum all come into play with Mandopop.

This chapter examines China's musical history, starting with the birth of Chinese popular music in the East Asian jazz mecca of 1920s Shanghai and tracing musical and cultural developments to the present day. It includes a brief overview of alternative musical genres in the PRC such as Beijing rock and revolutionary opera, among others. It considers the ways in which Taiwan's musical ethos influenced the PRC music industry and how Taiwan's Mandopop has served as a middle zone by introducing Western music and cultural values to the PRC. The chapter concludes by exploring Taiwan pop's role in exporting a very different version of womanhood to the PRC—directly confronting and subverting PRC state attempts at gender erasure from 1949 through the 1970s as well as contemporary masculinist discourse.

This chapter discusses Taiwan's musical history and explores the issue of why Taiwan pop is so appealing to Chinese-speaking audiences throughout the world. It focuses on the music's exceptional hybridity, beginning with foreign influences during Taiwan's colonial history under the Dutch and the Japanese, and continuing with Taiwan's political, cultural, and economic alliance with the United States and the resulting wealth of transnational musical influences from the rest of East Asia and the United States. It is argued that the hyper-hybridity of Mandopop could only have developed in an intensely transnational culture such as Taiwan, in which boundaries of urban/rural, past/present, and outsider/insider are constantly shifting. Paradoxically, it is precisely this hybrid transnationality that defines Taiwan's local culture.

This chapter explores the ubiquitous themes of loneliness and isolation in Taiwan's Mandopop songs. This, more than any other facet of the music, is what separates it from the PRC's musical genres, which have traditionally demanded a fanatically cheerful thematic intensity to celebrate the state. It is argued that Mandopop's melancholy can be seen as an attempt to deal with surprisingly serious issues. It provides a means for people in China and Taiwan to express loneliness, isolation, and anomie more honestly than everyday speech and culture allow. The people interviewed in Shanghai and Taipei believe that Mandopop's lonely lyrics point to a greater poetic sense and search for meaning than pop in the United States. Thus, rather than viewing the melancholy of Mandopop as revealing negative aspects of China or Taiwan, it may be more accurate to stress that Mandopop's lyrics are evidence of poetic creativity, of careful introspection, of emotional expression denied in everyday conversations, and of reasserting humanity into a seemingly uncaring world.

This chapter explores the ways in which women's identities are constructed in Mandopop. For one, most female performers sing songs that are written by men. While this can also be said of many U.S. pop songs, the difference is that in China and Taiwan songwriters are famous in their own right and therefore the audience's categorization of a song as a “woman's song,” in spite of common knowledge that a man wrote the song, highlights the fact that women are active participants in male lyricists' depictions of seemingly innate differences between women and men. Women's roles are defined in such songs by a cultural emphasis for women to endure hardships rather than overcome them. Thus, women become allied with traditional values of perseverance and the acceptance of suffering. By emphasizing women's virtues and men's shortcomings, women's Mandopop can be seen as a critique of both men and modernity.

This chapter explores masculine identities in Mandopop. Mandopop's wenrou male—which translates into English as tender, sensitive, and somewhat androgynous by Western standards—directly counters the hypermasculine ethos of PRC-produced revolutionary songs or Beijing rock. The flexible images of Mandopop stars suggest a range of culturally accept able gender roles. Indeed, the degree to which these roles overlap is as noteworthy as when they fall into distinctly male or female categories. The wenrou male should not be seen as lacking masculinity in the context of Mandopop, but rather as possessing characteristics that all men would have if real men could only be so perfect.

This chapter examines the cultural biases embedded in critiques of Mandopop. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan's popular music swept across China. Many in the PRC government reacted to the values embedded in Taiwan's lyrics with mistrust and disdain, expressing a fear that Taiwan and Hong Kong's cultural incursion would result in the PRC's loss of national identity. In Taiwan, people complained of Mandopop's fast pace and changing nature and linked this to similar trends in Taiwan's society. More recently, several Taiwanese scholars have critiqued Mandopop for promoting patriarchal gender roles, and English-language publications complain of a lack of individualism in that songs are produced in teams of composers, lyricists, and performers. The chapter examines the cultural contexts of these critiques in order to obtain a better understanding of what is, after all, the most popular Chinese-language music in the world.