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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to

journalists, experts and long-time China I'll be talking to journalists, experts,

and longtime China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society, and more.

There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well.

How did the Chinese see these issues?

Music That's the sound of Tang Dynasty, one of China's greatest and earliest rock bands.

On this episode, I was speaking to Kaiser Kuo about the relatively short but special history

of rock in China. You might know him from the Fantastic Sinica podcast, but you might not know

that before he was a podcaster, he was one of the founding members of Tang Dynasty. On this episode,

we talk about how the opening up of China after the Cultural Revolution allowed in this

decisively Western musical genre, how it fused with Chinese musical traditions upon contact

and its lasting association with the 1989 Tianmen Square protests. I started by asking

Kaiser how he came to found Tan Dynasty. It's a little bit of an involved story, so please be merciful.

I was playing a band in college in the 1980s at UC Berkeley, and out of a fluke connection

through my father, we were actually invited to go to China to play.

And while that didn't pan out in the end, it did sort of plant the seed of me wanting to go to China

to play music.

And since I was the one who's communicating with the host organization over there, which

was something called the Shanghai International Youth Culture Exchange Association or something

like that, they were sending me all this, the sort of backline lists, the equipment that they had.

And I concluded that somebody over there must be playing rock music.

...