China's Relationship with Song and Dance Is Unselfconscious

The first thing most Chinese say upon learning that I am Indian is that I must love singing and dancing. They are nonplussed when I reply that, to me, it is the Chinese who seem to love singing and dancing. No, no – they wave away my observation, even as scenes unfolding across the country’s cities belie this denial. Parks full of couples shuffling through locally adapted ballroom dances. Clusters of youngsters on street corners filming themselves to Korean hip hop. In every Beijing hutong, at least one old man singing into the wind. I once watched a garbage recycler rig up makeshift karaoke equipment at the end of his shift and decompress by belting out mandopop. In no other country – and I have lived in eight – have I seen people sing and dance in public with such unselfconsciousness.

Spontaneously bursting into choreographed gyrations might be a staple of the Bollywood film industry, but in real life, as opposed to reel life, you’d be hard pressed to find any Indian couples running around trees crooning at each other. Movies, in India, do the work of fantasies, allowing the audience to imagine on screen what would be unimaginable in reality. In China, it is almost the opposite. In their collective imagined selves, the Han Chinese are industrious, unsentimental, practical, while their embodied selves are out in public performing song and dance routines with abandon.

Singing and dancing are activities that in the Chinese national narrative signal the periphery. It is what the country’s 56 shaoshu minzu or ethnic minorities ostensibly spend their folkloric days doing. In fact, the phrase most associated with the minorities is nengge shanwu (能歌善舞) or to be “good at singing and dancing.” It appears in schoolbooks, tourist brochures and television programmes so relentlessly that it has become embedded in the national psyche. The Han occupy the politically mature and economically capable centre, while minorities are reduced to colourful costumes and cultural performance. Indians might not be dismissed as fully, but their Bollywood-fuelled reputations put them firmly in the nengge shanwu category as well.

Last week I spent my Chinese class trying, without much success, to get my teacher, Niu Laoshi, to agree with any of this. As far as I can tell, I said, it is more likely to find Han Chinese prancing and humming in the parks and streets of Beijing than dancing Tibetans in Lhasa. But she was having none of it.

"We (Han) can't sing," she said. "We're so bad at dancing. We have no natural rhythm. It's not in our blood."

But everyone is always out singing and dancing, I replied. I showed her the video of the garbage recycler singing karaoke on my phone.

She giggled. "Okay, yes. Maybe we want to sing. But we're just so bad at it. I love singing but I'm too ashamed, because I can't hold a tune." A pause. "Not like you. You must be a great singer. Indians can really sing."

On the wanting-to-sing point, at least, I think Niu Laoshi is right. Karaoke is a famously massive industry in China. What is interesting is that even as younger generations grow less enchanted with it, energetic retirees are filling the daytime slots at karaoke parlours, transforming what were once nocturnal, youthful, spaces into senior community centres: places for catching up and snacking while singing a tune or two. A phenomenon that connects to public dancing as well.

Niu Laoshi’s response to the subject of guangchangwu (广场舞), literally "public square dance,” was that it was “just” an activity for old people to keep fit. But although my teacher might have explained away the phenomenon breezily, estimates in Chinese media put participation at 100 million plus people. It was one of the things I found most enchanting about China when I lived here in the oughties. Every evening, and on weekend afternoons, public spaces would fill with middle-aged and retired folk dancing in couples – parks, apartment courtyards, even in the rubble of construction sites. Sometimes there would be two old women dancing together, widows, locked in an embrace that had once held a husband or a lover, but not for a long time.

The interesting thing is that guangchangwu, however ubiquitous, does not register in the Han Chinese self-image as anything cultural. Over the years I have asked these dancers what draws them to it, and the answers are always the same: making friends, staying healthy. It is exercise. It is practical. It is, in other words, perfectly consistent with how the Han see themselves – industrious, unsentimental, grounded. Singing and dancing as culture, as identity, as performance: that belongs to the periphery. What happens in the parks every evening belongs to a different, more utilitarian, frequency.

But as I began to research the practice further, I realised that guangchangwu is far more than just exercise. It is in fact, modern Chinese history compressed into movement. Stories of revolution, displacement and demography are all encoded in its steps.

The dance moves themselves trace their lineage to yangge (秧歌) – "rice sprout song" – a folk tradition performed by women in northern China's village squares to protect the harvest from evil spirits. This matters for two reasons. First, it puts paid to the notion that the Han have no folkloric dancing tradition of their own. Second, yangge's rural and communal nature made it attractive to the Communist Party during the Yan'an years (1936–1948), when the Chinese Communist Party systematically harnessed art and culture as tools of mass mobilisation. The village square became a stage for revolutionary ideology.

Moreover, the Mao era encouraged the habit of collective public movement. Work units practiced calisthenics together during exercise breaks; the Cultural Revolution introduced the zhongziwu, or "loyalty dance," performed in public to exalt Chairman Mao. For people who came of age in that era, as the majority of guangchangwu dancers are, group movement in public spaces is not strange, but familiar, even nostalgic. It is, perhaps, the only continuity in lives otherwise transformed beyond recognition.

The real explosion in public square dancing came in the 1990s and early 2000s, when economic reforms brought earlier retirement – as young as fifty for women – while simultaneously dismantling the danwei or work unit that had organized Chinese social life for decades. Overnight, millions of people found themselves with time, but without structure; with neighbours, but without community. Guangchangwu filled that vacuum. It was free. It was social. And it gave expression to the stubborn fact (notwithstanding the protestations of Niu laoshi) that the Chinese love to sing and dance!

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