My wife and I were among the thousands of fans who succumbed to the magic of Bob Dylan at the Taipei Arena on April 3. As I write, he plays in Shanghai, to be followed by Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.
However, on Wednesday, Dylan played the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing “strictly according to an approved program.”
At this venue for large popular events, huge renovations were begun during 2006, this creating a massive space of 42,000m2 that has since hosted such acts as Kylie Minogue and Karen Mok (莫文蔚). In the last day or so, commentators have been torturing themselves over Dylan’s Beijing play-list, delivered to a large audience. The questions ring out — was it offensive or subversive, did censorship damage his message and control the youth of China? By banning Blowing in the Wind did Chinese authoritarianism triumph over US liberalism?
However, it is now the attitude that compels, not just the lyrics, and attitude is very difficult to define or confine. If Dylan remains a sheng ren (聖人) among the youth of today, it is not because of the lyrics of a particular short song, but because of the example of a long life of reflective commitment to our world.
Capturing Dylan is a difficult task. In his debut in China, he played Hard Rain, Highway 61, All Along the Watchtower and that marvelous celebration of youth, Forever Young. These songs are not apolitical in any sense, they represent a cultural threat to all authoritarianism. Many in the audience, even in Taipei, did not recognize many standard Dylan numbers, not because he mumbled or because the sound system failed or because they were unfamiliar with the songs, but because Dylan determinedly pursued his music in the way he thinks best, refusing to repeat any old formulas and happy enough to confuse and bemuse. You do not settle in your seats at a Dylan concert.
This is what matters and this is the quiet threat to China and to any authoritarian regime of any position on the political spectrum, the refusal to be mundane, to bear repetition, to conform to the expected. The Chinese regime may never see it as a “clear and present danger,” but its insidious cultural impacts should never be underestimated. A karaoke rendering of any song, Blowing in the Wind included, could hardly have the same effect on youthful audiences as the Dylanesque mood of unrepentant individualism.
This is what threatens any authoritarian regime whatsoever, including the unreformed aspects of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan, and brings together in a croaky old harmony the new youth in Taipei, Beijing and anywhere else that Dyalan and his like are allowed to go. The Beijing old boys may not get it, but that is all to the good for those who believe in the liberating force of middle class youth exposed to global mass media.
In Beijing he sang Hard Rain and was hugely welcomed by a packed house of 6,000, playing for two hours and with two encores, compared with Taipei’s one-and-a-half hours and one encore. Those journalists who have claimed that in Beijing he was merely “singing to the Culture Ministry’s tune” have missed the underlying rhythm or meaning of the occasion and all the others like it. In a world of mass media, however inane some journalists remain, newspapers, social media, blogs and so on make cultural restrictions absolutely redundant.
The message of Dylan was not merely in his lyrics from the 1960s, but in the reality of his anarchic presence this year. This cannot be stopped once he is there, and right now there will be many thousands of pictures, video clips, messages and chats circulating throughout China that go well beyond the original context of “blowing in the wind” — for the meaning of Dylan is beyond the wind itself, out there among the netizens of East Asia.
The TV reportage dwelt mainly on political exclusions from the play-list, but the voice-over that explained this to viewers was competing with a live Chinese busker outside the gymnasium, shown clearly on film playing his guitar and singing the lyrics of Blowing in the Wind, unmolested and to all and sundry.
That is where things have changed and this is precisely what the real Taiwan and China are sharing now. The Chinese authorities may well continue to believe that they exerted control over Dylan and his message, but they never did. That is the wonder of our present age: Even when it deteriorates into the crass and the obvious, it should be celebrated as an improvement on all that has gone before. In such events as the Dylan tour, a new world is in the making that is increasingly beyond all political regimes.
Those who are seeing this disappearing are misreading recent history. For the average Chinese farmer, shopkeeper or small tradesman today living even in the hinterlands of the coastal developments, life is decidedly better than it was under the Four Modernizations, under Mao Zedong (毛澤東), under warlordism or under the poverty and avarice that characterized the failing imperial regime of the 19th century as it came up against the aggressive and myopic demands of the military-industrial systems of the West. Much better for the young to see Dylan and learn from him than a British gunboat and its cargo of doom.
Ian Inkster is a professor of international history at Nottingham Trent University in England and a professor of global history at Wenzao Ursuline College, Kaohsiung.
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