關於 mainland chinese pop ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

剛剛的北美之行，在演出之餘，當然也勾結了不少的當地的媒體。

#lgbtqInHongKong #CensorshipInChina #FreedomOfSpeech #LiberateHongKong #StandWithHongKong #CantoPop

//Anthony Wong’s Forbidden Colors

Out Hong Kong Canto-pop star brings his activism to US during his home’s protest crisis

BY MICHAEL LUONGO

From 1988’s “Forbidden Colors,” named for a 1953 novel by gay Japanese writer Yukio Mishima to this year’s “Is It A Crime?,” commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Hong Kong Canto-pop star Anthony Wong Yiu-ming has combined music and activism over his long career. As Hong Kong explodes in revolt against Beijing’s tightening grip with the One Country, Two Systems policy ticking to its halfway point, Wong arrived stateside for a tour that included ’s Gramercy Theatre.

Gay City News caught up with 57-year-old Wong in the Upper West Side apartment of Hong Kong film director Evans Chan, a collaborator on several films. The director was hosting a gathering for Hong Kong diaspora fans, many from the New York For Hong Kong (NY4HK) solidarity movement.

The conversation covered Wong’s friendship with out actress, model, and singer Denise Ho Wan-see who co-founded the LGBTQ group Big Love Alliance with Wong and recently spoke to the US Congress; the late Leslie Cheung, perhaps Asia’s most famous LGBTQ celebrity; the threat of China’s rise in the global order; and the ongoing relationship among Canto-pop, the Cantonese language, and Hong Kong identity.

Wong felt it was important to point out that Hong Kong’s current struggle is one of many related to preserving democracy in the former British colony that was handed back to China in 1997. While not his own lyrics, Wong is known for singing “Raise the Umbrella” at public events and in Chan’s 2016 documentary “Raise the Umbrellas,” which examined the 2014 Occupy Central or Umbrella Movement, when Hong Kong citizens took over the central business district for nearly three months, paralyzing the city.

Wong told Gay City News, “I wanted to sing it on this tour because it was the fifth anniversary of the Umbrella Movement last week.”

He added, “For a long time after, nobody wanted to sing that song, because we all thought the Umbrella Movement was a failure. We all thought we were defeated.”

Still, he said, without previous movements “we wouldn’t have reached today,” adding, “Even more so than the Umbrella Movement, I still feel we feel more empowered than before.”

Hong Kong’s current protests came days after the 30th anniversary commemorations of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, known in China as the June 4th Incident. Hong Kong is the only place on Chinese soil where the Massacre can be publicly discussed and commemorated. Working with Tats Lau of his band Tat Ming Pair, Wong wrote the song “Is It A Crime?” to perform at Hong Kong’s annual Tiananmen commemoration. The song emphasizes how the right to remember the Massacre is increasingly fraught.

“I wanted our group to put out that song to commemorate that because to me Tiananmen Square was a big enlightenm­ent,” a warning of what the Beijing government will do to those who challenge it, he said, adding that during the June 4 Victoria Park vigil, “I really felt the energy and the power was coming back to the people. I really felt it, so when I was onstage to sing that song I really felt the energy. I knew that people would go onto the street in the following days.”

As the genre Canto-pop suggests, most of Wong’s work is in Cantonese, also known as Guangdonghua, the language of Guangdong province and Hong Kong. Mandarin, or Putonghua, is China’s national language. Wong feels Beijing’s goal is to eliminate Cantonese, even in Hong Kong.

“When you want to destroy a people, you destroy the language first, and the culture will disappear,” he said, adding that despite Cantonese being spoken by tens of millions of people, “we are being marginaliz­ed.”

Canto-pop and the Cantonese language are integral to Hong Kong’s identity; losing it is among the fears driving the protests.

“Our culture is being marginalized, more than five years ago I think I could feel it coming, I could see it coming,” Wong said. “That’s why in my music and in my concerts, I kept addressing this issue of Hong Kong being marginaliz­ed.”

This fight against the marginalization of identity has pervaded Wong’s work since his earliest days.

“People would find our music and our words, our lyrical content very apocalyptic,” he explained. “Most of our songs were about the last days of Hong Kong, because in 1984, they signed over the Sino-British declaration and that was the first time I realized I was going to lose Hong Kong.”

Clarifying identity is why Wong officially came out in 2012, after years of hints. He said his fans always knew but journalists hounded him to be direct.

“I sang a lot of songs about free love, about ambiguity and sexuality — even in the ‘80s,” he said, referring to 1988’s “Forbidden Colors.” “When we released that song as a single, people kept asking me questions.”

In 1989, he released the gender-fluid ballad “Forget He is She,” but with homosexuality still criminalized until 1991, he did not state his sexuality directly.

That changed in 2012, a politically active year that brought Hong Kongers out against a now-defunct plan to give Beijing tighter control over grade school curriculum. Raymond Chan Chi-chuen was elected to the Legislative Council, becoming the city’s first out gay legislator. In a concert, Wong used a play on the Chinese word “tongzhi,” which has an official meaning of comrade in the communist sense, but also homosexual in modern slang. By flashing the word about himself and simultaneously about an unpopular Hong Kong leader considered loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, he came out.

“The [2012] show is about identity about Hong Kong, because the whole city is losing its identity,” he said. “So I think I should be honest about it. It is not that I had been very dishonest about it, I thought I was honest enough.”

That same year he founded Big Love Alliance with Denise Ho, who also came out that year. The LGBTQ rights group organizes Hong Kong’s queer festival Pink Dot, which has its roots in Singapore’s LGBTQ movement. Given the current unrest, however, Pink Dot will not be held this year in Hong Kong.

As out celebrities using their star power to promote LGBTQ issues, Wong and Ho follow in the footsteps of fellow Hong Konger Leslie Cheung, the late actor and singer known for “Farewell My Concubine” (1993), “Happy Together” (1997), and other movies where he played gay or sexually ambiguous characters.

“He is like the biggest star in Hong Kong culture,” said Wong, adding he was not a close friend though the two collaborated on an album shortly before Cheung’s 2003 suicide.

Wong said that some might think he came to North America at an odd time, while his native city is literally burning. However, he wanted to help others connect to Hong Kong.

“My tool is still primarily my music, I still use my music to express myself, and part of my concern is about Hong Kong, about the world, and I didn’t want to cancel this tour in the midst of all this unrest,” he said. “In this trip I learned that I could encourage more people to keep an eye on what is going on in Hong Kong.”

Wong worries about the future of LGBTQ rights in Hong Kong, explaining, “We are trying to fight for the freedom for all Hong Kongers. If Hong Kongers don’t have freedom, the minorities won’t.”

That’s why he appreciates Taiwan’s marriage equality law and its leadership in Asia on LGBTQ rights.

“I am so happy that Taiwan has done that and they set a very good example in every way and not just in LGBT rights, but in democracy,” he said.

Wong was clear about his message to the US, warning “what is happening to Hong Kong won’t just happen to Hong Kongers, it will happen to the free world, the West, all those crackdowns, all those censorships, all those crackdowns on freedom of the press, all this crackdown will spread to the West.”

Wong’s music is banned in Mainland China because of his outspokenness against Beijing.

Like other recent notable Hong Kong visitors including activist Joshua Wong who testified before Congress with Ho, Wong is looking for the US to come to his city’s aid.

Wong tightened his body and his arms against himself, his most physically expressive moment throughout the hour and a half interview, and said, “Whoever wants to have a relationship with China, no matter what kind of relationship, a business relationship, an artistic relationship, or even in the academic world, they feel the pressure, they feel that they have to be quiet sometimes. So we all, we are all facing this situation, because China is so big they really want the free world to compromise.”

(These remarks came just weeks before China’s angry response to support for Hong Kong protesters voiced by the Houston Rockets’ general manager that could threaten significant investment in the National Basketball Association by that nation.)

Wong added, “America is the biggest democracy in the world, and they really have to use their influence to help Hong Kong. I hope they know this is not only a Hong Kong issue. This will become a global issue because China really wants to rule the world.”

Of that prospect, he said, “That’s very scary.”//

//A Cantopop star publicly supported Hong Kong protesters. So Beijing disappeared his music.

By AUGUST BROWN

The 2 million pro-democracy protesters who have flooded the streets of Hong Kong over the last few months have been tear-gassed, beaten by police and arrested arbitrarily. But many of the territory’s most famous cultural figures have yet to speak up for them. Several prominent musicians, actors and celebrities have even sided with the cops and the government in Beijing.

The protesters are demanding rights to fair elections and judicial reform in the semiautonomous territory. Yet action film star Jackie Chan, Hong Kong-born K-pop star Jackson Wang of the group GOT7 and Cantopop singers Alan Tam and Kenny Bee have supported the police crackdown, calling themselves “flag protectors.” Other Hong Kong cultural figures have stayed silent, fearing for their careers.

The few artists who have spoken out have seen their economic and performing prospects in mainland China annihilated overnight. Their songs have vanished from streaming services, their concert tours canceled. But a few musicians have recently traveled to America to support the protesters against long odds and reprisals from China.

“Pop musicians want to be quiet about controversy, and on this one they’re particularly quiet,” said Anthony Wong Yiu-ming, 57, the singer and cofounder of the pioneering Hong Kong pop group Tat Ming Pair.

Wong is a popular, progressive Cantopop artist — a Hong Kong Bryan Ferry or David Bowie, with lyrics sung in the territory’s distinct dialect. But he, along with such singer-actors as Denise Ho and Deanie Ip, have made democratic reforms the new cause of their careers, even at the expense of their musical futures in China. Wong’s on tour in the U.S. and will perform a solo show in L.A. on Tuesday.

“It’s rebelling against the establishment, and [most artists] just don’t want to,” Wong said. “Of course, I’m very disappointed, but I never expected different from some people. Freedom of speech and civil liberties in Hong Kong are not controversial. It’s basic human rights. But most artists and actors and singers, they don’t stand with Hong Kongers.”

Hong Kong protesters
Hundreds of people form a human chain at Victoria Peak in Hong Kong on Sept. 13.(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
The protests are an echo — and escalation — of the Occupy Central movement five years ago that turned into a broad pro-democracy effort known as the Umbrella Movement. Those protests, led by teenage activist Joshua Wong (no relation), rebelled against a new policy of Beijing pre-screening candidates for political office in Hong Kong to ensure party loyalty.

Protesters were unsuccessful in stopping those policies, but the movement galvanized a generation of activists.

These latest demonstrations were in response to a proposed policy of extraditing suspected criminals from Hong Kong to mainland China, which activists feared would undermine their territory’s legal independence and put its residents at risk. The protests now encompass a range of reforms — the withdrawal of the extradition bill, secured voting rights, police reform, amnesty for protesters and a public apology for how Beijing and police have portrayed the demonstrations.

Wong, already respected as an activist for LGBT causes in Hong Kong, is one of vanishingly few musicians to have put their futures on the line to push for those goals.

Wong’s group Tat Ming Pair was one of the most progressive Cantonese acts of the ’80s and ’90s (imagine a politically radical Chinese Depeche Mode). When Wong spoke out in favor of the Umbrella Movement at the time, he gained credibility as an activist but paid the price as an artist: His touring and recording career evaporated on the mainland.

The Chinese government often pressures popular services like Tencent (the country’s leading music-streaming service, with 800 million monthly users) to remove artists who criticize the government. Artists can find longstanding relationships with live promoters on ice and lucrative endorsement deals drying up.

“This government will do things to take revenge on you,” Wong said. “If you’re not obedient, you’ll be punished. Since the Umbrella Movement, I’ve been put on a blacklist in China. I anticipated that would happen, but what I did not expect was even local opportunities decreased as well. Most companies have some ties with mainland China, and they didn’t want to make their China partners unhappy, so they might as well stop working with us.”

Censorship is both overt and subtly preemptive, said Victoria Tin-bor Hui, a professor and Hong Kong native who teaches Chinese politics and history at the University of Notre Dame.

“Every time artists or stars say anything even remotely sympathetic to protesters or critical of the government, they get in trouble,” Hui said. “You can literally have your career ruined. Denise Ho, after she joined the Umbrella Movement, everything she had listed online or on shelves was taken off. Companies [including the cosmetics firm Lancôme] told her they would have nothing more to do with her, and she started doing everything on her own.”

So Wong and other artists like Ho have been pushing back where they can.

Wong’s recent single, “Is It a Crime,” questions Beijing crackdowns on all memorials of the Tiananmen Square massacre, especially in Hong Kong, where there was a robust culture of activism and memorials around that tragedy. The single, which feels akin to Pink Floyd’s expansive, ominous electronic rock, has been blacklisted on mainland streaming services and stores.

Wong plans to speak out to commemorate the anniversary of the Umbrella Movement on this tour as well.

“The government is very afraid of art and culture,” Wong said. “If people sing about liberty and freedom of speech, the government is afraid. When I sing about the anniversary of Tiananmen, is it a crime to remember what happened? To express views? I think the Chinese government wants to suppress this side of art and freedom.”

The fallout from his support of the protests has forced him to work with new, more underground promoters and venues. The change may have some silver linings, as bookers are placing his heavy synth-rock in more rebellious club settings than the Chinese casinos he’d often play stateside. (In L.A., he’s playing 1720, a downtown venue that more often hosts underground punk bands.)

“We lost the second biggest market in the world, but because of what we are fighting for, in a way, we gained some new fans. We met new promoters who are interested in promoting us in newer markets. It’s opened new options for people who don’t want to follow” the government’s hard-line approach, Wong said.

Hui agreed that while loyalty from pro-democracy protesters can’t make up for the lost income of the China market, artists should know that Hong Kongers will remember whose side they were on during this moment and turn out or push back accordingly.

“You make less money, but Hong Kong pro-democracy people say, ‘These are our own singers, we have to save them,’” Hui said. “They support their own artists and democracy as part of larger effort to blacklist companies that sell out Hong Kong.”

Ho testified before Congress last week to support Hong Kong’s protesters. “This is not a plea for so-called foreign interference. This is a plea for democracy,” Ho said in her speech. A new bill to ban U.S. exports of crowd-control technology to Hong Kong police has bipartisan support.

No Hong Kong artists are under any illusions that the fight to maintain democracy will be easy. Even the most outspoken protesters know the long odds against a Chinese government with infinite patience for stifling dissent. That’s why support from cultural figures and musicians can be even more meaningful now, Hui said.

“Artists, if they say anything, that cheers people on,” Hui said. “Psychologists say Hong Kong suffers from territory-wide depression. Even minor symbolic gestures from artists really lift people’s morale.”

Pro-democracy artists, like protesters, are more anxious than ever. They’ve never been more invested in these uprisings, but they also fear the worst from the mainland Chinese government. “If you asked me six months ago, I was not very hopeful,” Wong said. “But after what’s happened, even though the oppression is bigger, we are stronger and more determined than before.”

Anthony Wong Yiu-ming

Where: 1720, 1720 E. 16th St.
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday
Tickets: $55-$150
Info: 1720.la //

//Hong Kong singer Anthony Wong scores hit with Tiananmen song

By JUWON PARK

HONG KONG (AP) — Thirty years after it was crushed by China’s army, the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement is being commemorated in art, literature, public rallies and even synth pop.

Hong Kong singer Anthony Wong’s latest release, “Is It a Crime,” recorded with longtime musical partner Tats Lau, is finding an audience by doing just that. The two make up the group Tat Ming Pair, long a staple of the local music scene known as Cantopop for the Cantonese language in which the music is recorded.

Released in May, the composition has been banned in mainland China, where all discussion of the protest movement and the military crackdown is strictly taboo.

Wong says the song asks difficult questions as to what might constitute a crime of remembrance and commemoration under China’s authoritarian one-party communist regime.

“Holding a candlelight vigil or just remembering what happened in the past could be a crime,” Wong told a crowd of 80 or so packed into a dimly lit room this past week for the screening of a documentary about the historic 1989 events held by local broadcaster RTHK.

“Writing an article and singing a song could be a crime. One day, anything could be a crime,” said Wong, wearing a brown fedora hat and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Down With Big Brother.”

Then a British colony, Hong Kong was a major base for the student protesters, especially after the bloody crackdown in which hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed. Now a semi-autonomous Chinese territory, it has retained freedoms unknown on the mainland and holds an annual candlelight vigil and rally for the victims and the pro-democracy movement.

Tat Ming Pair has been making Beijing uncomfortable with its mix of danceable synth-based rhythms and pointed social observation since 1986, when the group released its first album.

Wong said people in Hong Kong should continue to hold rallies and memorial events for 1989 because the city is “the only place in the biggest country in the world, population wise, that we can talk about what we want.”

However, speaking out against the Communist government has come with a hefty price tag for Wong. He said he has been unable to perform in mainland China ever since his involvement in the 2015 Umbrella street protest movement that sought greater democracy in Hong Kong. Commercial sponsorships and endorsements from “almost everywhere” have dried up, he said.

Other Hong Kong entertainers are not immune to Beijing’s effort to eradicate the memories of the bloody 1989 crackdown. Various music streaming services, including Apple Music, have removed a song by Jackie Cheung with a reference to the crackdown.

In past years, Denise Ho, a Cantopop star known for her pro-democracy stance, had her concert suddenly canceled after Global Times, a tabloid owned by the Chinese Communist Party, called out cosmetics giant Lancome for inviting her to appear at a promotional event. Anthony Wong Chau-sang, a Hong Kong actor, has said on several occasions that his film roles went away after he spoke out against the Communist government.

Amid simmering political tensions in Hong Kong in light of the 30th anniversary, Wong’s song has been well-received, topping the city’s iTunes chart. Wong said he’s surprised by the song’s popularity because “the climate is not for this kind of music.”

“If people like (the song), that means people still remember,” he said. “I am glad that people remember it.”//