North Korea's ideology

North Korea is in the news again for all the wrong reasons. By now the country’s reputation as totalitarian, anachronistic, backward, isolated and wacky has spread even here in China, although the Chinese government goes on giving North Korea far more support than anyone else in the world.

I will not engage in geopolitical speculation regarding the ongoing crisis, since others have already done so more and better than I can. Rather, I would like to use this space to review an interesting book I have read recently on North Korea, which seems to offer some insight into the country's internal discourse. The book is “The Cleanest Race: how North Koreans see themselves, and why it matters”, by B.R. Meyers.

Meyers is an American academic who has lived for years in South Korea and speaks Korean fluently. He has spent years pouring over the archives of North Korean propaganda available in Seoul, which are apparently quite extensive, since until recently the North went on sending its own propaganda to the South in the hope of ingniting a nationalistic rebellion against the “Yankee invaders”. Basing himself thus mainly on propaganda for internal consumption in Korean, rather than the propaganda in English which is released for foreign consumption, Meyers comes up with his own thesis on the ideology which underpins the North Korean regime.

Meyers claims that the common description of North Korea as a Stalinist regime is wrong, as is the less common claim that it is in fact based on Confucianism. According to him, the real ideology of the North Korean regime is a form of race-based nationalism which has most in common with the fascist regimes of the Second World War, and was initially inspired by the racist ideology which the Japanese regime foisted on Korea during the thirties.

The main source of internal legitimacy of the North Korean regime derives from the line that the South of the peninsula is occupied by the US, and that Pyongyang is on a glorious nationalist mission to free the whole of Korea from the foreign occupiers. Open racism and xenophobia, and the image of Koreans as a pure, innocent, child-like race which needs a strong leader to protect it from the cruel outside world, are the ideological basis of the North Korean world view. Memories of US atrocities during the Korean War, which the regime constantly nurtures, help to prop up its support.

Meyers claims that in this sense, North Korea has always been ideologically different from China and the Soviet bloc, even in the past. One finds almost no references to proletarian internationalism in North Korean internal propaganda, and only perfunctory ones to Marxism-Leninism. In fact, North Korea’s new constitution from 2009 doesn’t make any reference to communism. What’s more, Meyers claims that even North Korea’s official state ideology of Juche (“self-reliance”) is a sham, created mainly to draw attention away from the real ideology of racial nationalism.

According to Meyers, North Korea’s people basically still embrace the regime’s world view, which is why it manages to remain in power. Since the terrible famine of the mid-nineties, North Korea has become a very different place, and the people are no longer completely cut off from information about the outside world the way they used to be. It is now common knowledge in the North that South Korea is actually much more prosperous, and even the regime's internal propaganda no longer denies this. However, as long as the populace goes on believing that the South is a “Yankee colony”, and that its people want to drive out the Americans, the regime will retain its legitimacy.

From this point of view, the North Korean government is different from the East German one, which based its legitimacy on being able to offer a good standard of living for its people, and could not survive when its people realized that West Germans actually lived much better. Meyers even makes the eye-catching claim that the people in modern Pyongyang give a much happier impression than the people in East Berlin did in the eighties (a place which he visited), and that this is because the regime’s ideology has not lost its legitimacy in their eyes.

Although Meyer’s thesis is interesting and based on a deep knowledge of the subject, I can’t help wondering how much one can really draw a line between the ideology of the Soviet block and the kind of racist nationalism he is describing. After all, most of the “Socialist” countries made use of nationalist feeling and even racism. In Maoist China, in particular, much propaganda centered on leading China to a great national renaissance after it had been divided and mistreated by evil foreigners. Xenophobia certainly existed, although it probably wasn’t fundamental to the regime’s legitimacy the way it clearly is in North Korea.

Perhaps some of North Korea’s extremeness is rooted in is history. Korea is a country which is historically far more ethnically homogenous than China. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century it adhered to a strict isolationist policy which earned it the nickname of “the Hermit Kingdom”. Koreans could be put to death for just speaking to a foreigner. From this point of view, I suppose it was easy to turn resentment against foreigners and self-reliance into the pillars of North Korea’s ideology, especially when the Southern half of the peninsula is indeed covered with US military bases.

The extreme version of Neo-Confucianism practiced in Korea up until the nineteenth century, which was more rigid and hierarchical than Confucianism in China ever was, might also have made it easier for Kim Il Sung to foist such an extreme authoritarianism on his country.

The book ends with a prediction that the most dangerous thing for the regime would be if the North Korean masses became aware that the South Koreans are actually quite happy in their own Republic and would never want to live under Pyongyang. There is simply no way that the worldview which the government has fostered could be reconciled with this fact. However, Meyers also makes the dire prediction that the regime will counter any sign of internal dissent by attempting to increase tension with its external enemies, the US and South Korea, and the result might even be a serious conflict. Perhaps this prediction is now coming to pass.

(a statue of Kim Il Sung clutching a firearm in Pyongyang)

Visit to Yujiacun, the stone village

An Italian friend of mine visited Beijing for a conference last week. He had already been to China two times previously, but had only seen the major cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin) and told me that he wanted to see something of the “real China”. I suggested we use the weekend after his conference finished to go on a trip and go see the “real China”.

If you live in Beijing, only have a weekend available, and don’t want to spend a fortune by taking planes, the logical way to see the “real China” is to go somewhere in Hebei. Hebei is the province which surrounds Beijing. It is almost as large as Great Britain, and has a bigger population. The province’s proximity to Beijing does not make it a particularly prosperous or “happening” place. On the contrary, it is relatively backward and agricultural, just like most of Northern China.

Looking through the list of Hebei’s tourist attractions, I decided on Yujiacun (于家村), a village whose well preserved old buildings made of stone have turned it into a minor attraction. I wasn’t expecting too much from the village itself, since many Chinese tourist sights turn out to be tacky and commercialized places with a Disneyland feel overrun by hordes of Chinese tour groups, for whom the authenticity of what they are seeing is of no interest whatsoever. However, I thought that the village’s remote location right on the border between Hebei and Shanxi would at least make the journey to get there more interesting, and might have kept it a bit off the tourist trail.

(the village of Yujiacun as seen from above)

The first step of the journey was taking the high speed train from Beijing to Shijiazhuang, Hebei’s provincial capital. After spending the night in this non-descript city, the next day we made off for Yujiacun. To get there, we took two different buses and travelled for two hours. The rickety buses took us through some very poor rural scenery, dotted with coal mines and quarries. What was most striking was the amount of dust in the air, and the amount of lorries on the road. I have literally never seen such a lot of lorries on a single day.

Due to the dust and the dryness of the North Chinese winter, the scenery was overwhelmingly brown. The air was brown, the villages were brown, and the people brown. Although I wouldn’t exactly call the landscape beautiful, it had a certain grandiosity, and it was certainly fascinating for my two friends, who were getting their first taste of the “real China”.

After a last stretch on a bumpy country road, we arrived in Yujiacun. The village was founded by a grandson of Yu Qian (1398-1457), a Ming dynasty defense minister who helped defend China from the Mongols, and was executed by the emperor in return for his efforts. The place’s name means “the village of the Yu clan”, and indeed almost all the inhabitants share the surname Yu, which was passed down by the original founder. “Clan villages” where everyone shares the same surname are common in China.

The village’s particularity is that all the houses are made of stone, meaning that they are well preserved. Winding little lanes take you past courtyard houses built during the Ming and Qing dynasties. In a place like Italy a village where the houses all date back to a few centuries ago would be the norm, but not so in China, where old houses are actually quite rare. In the countryside dwellings were often made of wood, and in cities much has been destroyed in the last decades to make way for modern housing blocks.

My low expectations of our trip’s destination turned out to be quite unfounded. Yujiacun was genuinely interesting and peaceful, and the atmosphere was not very touristy at all. The place’s remoteness means that few visitors actually make it there, and even less so in March, when temperatures are still quite low. We only met three other obvious tourists, who were Chinese. Although Yujiacun is mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide I am pretty sure few foreigners make it there, and it would take some serious guts to attempt the journey without speaking Chinese.

Unlike other sights I have visited in Hebei, nobody tried to rip us off or charge exhorbitant entry prices. There was a single ticket valid for all the village's sights, at a very reasonable price. Most of the locals happily minded their business in their ancient stone houses, since visitors are too few for them to have turned to the business of milking tourists for cash.

An interesting sight we came across in Yujiacun is the sixteenth century Qingliang Pavilion. The odd structure was built by a madman called Yu Xichun, who wanted to see Beijing from the top. He allegedly built the three storey pavilion on his own over 16 years, working only at night. It was obviously built by an amateur architect, since it has no foundation and its stones are all of different sizes. The building is full of shrines to Guanyin and other Chinese religious figures, and a graphic pictorial depiction of what awaits bad people in the Chinese hell, which is remarkably similar to the hell of Western tradition.

I left feeling pleased with my choice for an outing. It is good to know that there are still some attractions left in China with genuine old buildings and sights, no hordes of Chinese tour groups wearing identical red hats, no kitsch souvenir shops and nobody trying to rip off weary travellers. One just has to go a bit further off the beaten route to find them.

(Scenes of the tortures of hell painted on the walls of the Qingliang Pavillion)

What do George Galloway and a Beijing restaurant manager have in common?

The idiot restaurant owner in Beijing who stuck the racist sign in the photo below outside his restaurant has now taken it down again, it transpires. The sign is bilingual, and the English (or rather the Chinglish) reads "This shop does not receive The Japanese The Phillippines The Vietnamese and dog."

The sign announces that people from the three countries currently involved in territorial disputes with China over uninhabited islands, and also dogs, will not be served. The reference is to the famous sign which supposedly once existed in Shanghai when it was occupied by foreign powers, forbidding "Chinese and dogs" from entering the premises.

The restaurant in question is located in Houhai, a touristy area of central Beijing which straddles a lake. The restaurant owner claims he has no regrets, but he was just getting too many phone calls about it. I'm glad to know somebody still cares. I hope there were many Chinese calling too.

Last week, British member of Parliament George Galloway walked out of a debate in Oxford University when he found out that the student he was debating against was Israeli. The motion of the debate was "Israel should withdraw from the West Bank immediately". After realizing that the other debater, who had an Israeli name, was indeed Israeli, Galloway got up and said "I don't recognize Israel and I don't debate with Israelis" as he walked out of the door. If not recognizing Israel can be considered legitimate, not debating with people because they were born in a certain country is just as bad as not serving them in your restaurant. 

Let's hope the principle that you should never discriminate against people on the basis of the country they were born in spreads wider and wider in the future, to include all Beijing restaurant owners and all British Members of Parliament.

Why are foreign missionaries tolerated in China?

A report appeared yesterday in the Guardian about the activities of foreign Christian missionaries in Tibet.

Although I am well aware of the extent of missionary activity in China, even I was a bit surprised at the idea that Christianity might be making inroads into Tibet. After all the Tibetans, unlike the Han, have an extremely vital religion of their own which is intrinsically bound up with their ethnic identity, and it seems unlikely that they would easily give it up. The article claims that estimates of the number of Tibetans who have converted to Christianity range "from zero to thousands", so it would seem like the missionaries are fortunately (from my viewpoint) not having much success.

The Guardian suggests that the Chinese authorities tolerate foreign missionaries partly because they are seen as a counterforce to Tibetan Buddhism, which is highly bound up with Tibetan irredentism and identity. Personally I find this explanation rather unlikely. The article suggests that the main center of missionary activity is the city of Xining. For those of you not familiar with the region, Xining is the capital of Qinghai province, a Chinese province which geographically lies mostly within the Tibetan plateau.

Although this province is historically part of Tibet, only 20% of its population is now actually Tibetan, and it is administratively distinct from the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), which is considered to be the proper Tibet. While foreigners need a special visa to visit the TAR, and can only do so in tour groups, in Qinghai there are no specific restrictions any more than there are in the rest of China. If foreign missionaries operated in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet proper, I would find that much more surprising, and necessitating a special explanation. However, that does not seem to be the case.

I would imagine that the reason why missionaries are tolerated in Qinghai province is the same reason that they basically seem to be tolerated throughout China.Western reporting on Christians in China often seems to focus on how the Chinese government represses or censors Christians. It is true that legally foreigners are not allowed to proselytize in China (whatever their religion). It is also true that officially all religious believers have to belong to one of the officially sanctioned religious organizations, which are under strict government control. It is true that the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association is obliged to accept the bishops which the Chinese government appoints, rather than the ones the Vatican appoints, leading to the Vatican not recognizing the only official body of Chinese Catholics. It is also true that there have been cases of leaders of unregistered "house churches" being arrested and their followers being harassed.

The truth is, however, that beyond the well publicized cases of persecution (which may depend on the whims of local authorities, especially if they take place in rural areas) and beyond the seemingly restrictive legislation, if you live in China you do not get the feeling that the central government is exactly hell bent on stopping foreign missionaries, or on preventing Chinese people from being Christian. American evangelical missionaries seem to operate pretty freely, like the ones who go to Renmin University's famous English corner on Friday night and use the occasion to preach to dozens of impressionable Chinese students. Apparently one of them was once detained recently after a member of the public made a complaint. The police just questioned him and then let him go, and he was back at the English corner preaching the following week.

Foreign English teachers who use their position as a cover to proselytize among their students are also quite common, and no one seems to care or do anything about them. Chinese young people who consider themselves Christians seem to receive no trouble for it, even when they do not subscribe to one of the officially sanctioned churches. There is a rule that Communist party members are not allowed to follow a religion, but I doubt even that is taken too seriously.

I don't know the reason why the Chinese government is so reluctant to confront foreign missionaries and unregistered churches, but I can advance a hypothesis: since there are many questioning young people in China who aren't satisfied with just focusing on making money (China's current national obsession), perhaps the government would rather they joined nonsensical religious groups, fearing that otherwise they will end up in movements with a more political bent. After all, having read Marx when they were young, some of China's leaders perhaps remember the phrase on religion being the "people's opium", and have decided that they could use some of this opium in China too.

Terrible pollution in Beijing for the second time this month.

Beijing is once again blanketed in a thick coat of pollution today. Although the city’s air quality has always been atrocious, this last month has been particularly bad. The Chinese press reported today that during the whole of January Beijing has only enjoyed five days free of what the press calls 雾霾 (wùmái), which literally means “fog and haze”, but is understood to refer to smog caused by pollution.

A few weeks ago, on the weekend of the 12-13^th of January, air pollution indexes in Beijing (and many other regions of China) reached unheard of new heights, pushing the authorities to suggest that children and the elderly stay indoors. It was so bad that I actually developed a slight sore throat, which I think was a result of the pollution. Many others had similar complaints. Visibility was low, and quite a few people claimed there was a kind of burning smell in the air, although I must admit that I didn’t notice it myself. (Below, the view from my window on the 13th of January).

A few days later some welcome snow seemed to have improved matters by washing away some of the foul air, but since yesterday air pollution levels have skyrocketed again. The main impact this has on my life is that I have to walk to work instead of cycling, so as to avoid breathing in more of the polluted air than necessary. More people than usual are wearing little surgical masks on the street, but I don’t as I am aware that they are fairly useless in keeping the pollutants out of your lungs.

Fortunately I will be leaving Beijing on Friday and going home for a two week holiday. That is, as long as my flight isn’t cancelled because of the low visibility, something which happened to sixty flights yesterday. In any case it should snow tomorrow evening, clearing up the air again. Meanwhile, I can take comfort from the knowledge that British cities used to be just as bad during the Industrial revolution, as the Chinese government's ideologues love reminding you.

The Chinese press claimed today that the Beijing authorities are taking drastic temporary measures to lessen the pollution, including suspending the activities of 103 polluting factories around the city and of construction sites which produce dust. It is clear however that structural economic changes would be needed to address the underlying issue, and it is dubious that there is the political will to implement them.

Below is a photo of a “performance art” show put on by a group of artists in the city of Hefei, which has also been affected by the abnormal air pollution. The title of the show translates as “Resist the toxic smog. Make low carbon trips. Give me a clean world back.” Of course both the title of the show and the placards held up by the performers were sufficiently innocuous not to incur in the wrath of the authorities, neither blaming the government nor addressing it directly. 

(the slogans say "protect the world" and "resist the toxic smog, give me a clean world back")

Han Han's blog post on censorship and the Southern Weekly affaire

A few days ago an almost unprecedented event took place in China: a demonstration in favour of freedom of the press. Hundreds of people gathered in Guangzhou in front of the headquarters of the Southern Weekly newspaper, to express support for its struggle against censorship.

Southern Weekly is well known to be China’s most open and independent newspaper, and it has often been on the receiving end of government pressure in the past. Last week, the newspaper’s employees wrote an open letter to the provincial propaganda department of Guangdong, demanding the resignation of one of its highest ranking officials. They accuse him of surreptitiously revising one of the newspaper’s editorials, and having it published without their consent. (Note that the “propaganda department” is called 宣传部 or xuānchuánbù in Chinese. The word xuānchuán, although it can mean propaganda, doesn’t have the negative ring of the English term. It simply means disseminating information).

The editorial was originally entitled “China’s dream: the dream of constitutionalism”, and urged the government to respect the country’s constitution of 1982. After its revision, the title was changed to “We are closer than even before to our dreams”. The editorial’s original position had been altered to make it appear heavily pro-government, and the revised edition also contained various factual and typographical errors.

The newspaper's staff are now on strike, and the situation has quickly snowballed, with various intellectuals coming out in support of Southern Weekly all over China. Chinese internet sites have blocked related search-terms, and the Chinese media is of course mostly keeping quiet on the issue. The English edition of Global Times, which always tends to tackle sensitive topics from a pro-government angle, has come out with an editorial entitled “Freedom of the Press must serve society”. Characteristically, while remaining vague and avoiding the actual issue, it basically takes the line that freedom of the press “cannot go too far” and has to proceed at the same speed as “social transformation”.

The Chinese edition of the Global Times, on the other hand, has produced another editorial in which it claims that the entire story of the Southern Weekly article being altered is a fabrication, and defends the current censorship arrangements. Other newspapers have been forced to republish this editorial, although many have attempted to resist the order, and the Beijing newspaper Xinjing Bao’s publisher resigned in protest.

The anti-censorship demonstration in Guangzhou was confronted by a small group of counter-demonstrators who called the newspaper “a tool of US imperialism” and waved Chinese flags and banners of Chairman Mao. From the only photo I can find of them, they look like a rag-tag band of people who might well have been paid by the local authorities to stage their “counter-demonstration”.    

 What this whole story tells us, I think, is that in the world of Chinese media some people are fed up with the current level of censorship, and they are not afraid to say so out loud.

China’s most famous blogger, Hán Hán (韩寒), published a post on the issue on his Weibo page two days ago. You can find my translation below. The title is a reference to a well-known Southern Weekly headline, “there is always a power which makes us weep”. I was a bit unsure of the meaning in a few places, but I did my best to produce an accurate translation.

There is Always a Power.
     

Since my two Weibo posts have both been deleted, what am I to write?

When I was still a teenager, the Southern Weekly influenced me deeply, and it accompanied me throughout my youth. Later on I wrote a lot of articles, I also edited a magazine, and I came to really understand the meaning of “there is always a power which makes us weep”, and I understood that there is also a power which leaves us unsure of what to do. That power interferes with what you say, what you write, and what you do. Writers and reporters are all constrained by this power, and we can’t even see who holds it, let alone communicate with them, until you understand that what it does is cover you mouth and tell everyone you are happy.

You can have so-called freedoms, but only because they will punish you for it. No matter whether you’re engaged in literature, news or cinema, you have to expend a lot of energy in getting their authorization. If you want to discuss the regulations, they don’t even tell you clearly what the regulations are, so that every person is breaking the “regulations” at least to some extent. If you want to conform with their rules, you have to become them. We are always being careful of ourselves and each other, being fearful, and trying to find ways around it. They tear your clothes, throttle your throat, and at the same time they also convey the message that if you run faster or sing better, you are gaining glory for them in the world.  

We hardly have any world-class authors, film-directors, newspapers, magazines, films…. Of course, you could say that it is us, the professionals in these fields, who aren’t up to standard and are trying to shift responsibility; you could say that what is national is also global; you could ask why we have to go and cater to other people’s tastes; you could say Iran is much stricter than us, and also produces XXX; you could even say that our pandas are loved by children worldwide. Perhaps I’m not good enough, but at least I don’t accept that there are people who can wantonly delete me, change me and bind me. So this expression of public support isn’t just for the sake of a newspaper I love and of journalists who deserve respect, but its also for the sake of the other media and journalists who’ve found themselves in even worse circumstances with even more miserable results, and of course it is also for myself.

As a reader, the Southern Weekly has given me a lot. It empowers the powerless, and helps those less fortunate to move forwards, so now that it is itself powerless and unfortunate, let’s try and give it a bit of power, and accompany it as it continues moving ahead.

The post has not been deleted by Weibo, perhaps because of Han Han's popularity, and it has already received thousands of comments. When such a popular figure comes out so strongly against censorship on China's most popular blog, which has an audience of millions, it makes you think.

(In the picture, celebrity blogger Han Han)

Five good Chinese songs

In this post I am going to share with you some of my favourite Chinese songs.

I am doing this partly because I am aware how few Westerners listen to any Chinese music, even ones who understand Chinese and live in China. To be fair, I can understand why this is. Much of modern Chinese music, especially the most popular stuff, consists of extremely commercial and sugary pop songs, lacking in personality, style and depth.
There is, however, some decent and meaningful Chinese music out there too. And I am not talking about ancient music or Chinese opera, which is very much an acquired taste. I am talking about modern rock and pop music. Below are five Chinese songs which I actually listen to regularly because I enjoy them.

1)  One night in 北京 (One night in Beijing) by 信乐团 (Xin Yue Tuan)

This is my favourite song by Xin Yue Tuan (also known as Shin in English), which has to be my favourite Chinese rock band. The band is in fact Taiwanese, and it distinguishes itself from the rest of the Chinese music scene because it plays loud, expressive and emotional rock music. The real soul of the band was the lead singer Su Jian Xin, whose powerful and wide ranging voice is a rarity in Chinese music. He unfortunately left the group in 2007.

This song, which is sung entirely in Chinese except for the “One night in Beijing” line, is actually a cover of a song by Taiwanese singer Bobby Chen. The cover version has now become more famous than the original, and it is extremely well known throughout China. The lyrics are actually quite mysterious, and it is not immediately clear what the song is supposed to mean. Although it is a modern rock song, the chorus is sung in a falsetto voice which parodies Beijing opera. You can find the lyrics and an English translation here.

2) 一无所有 (Nothing to my name) by 崔健 (Cui Jian)

This is the trademark song by Cui Jian, the only real rock star Mainland China has ever known. A Beijinger of Korean ancestry, Cui Jian became famous towards the end of the eighties. He was probably one of the first Chinese professional rock musicians. Like all good rock stars, he was also a rebel and an anti-establishment figure. It’s a pity that China’s music scene seems unable to produce such figures nowadays. Interestingly, his first band included a Hungarian and a Madagascan who worked in foreign embassies in Beijing.

Cui Jian songs were often covertly political, and sometimes parodied old government slogans. He became one of the icons of the protesting students of ’89, and appeared at the protests before they were broken up. After the crackdown he went into hiding for a while, but he was soon able to return to Beijing. His first tour was however stopped short by the authorities after he started performing his political song “a Piece of Red Cloth” with a red blindfold across his eyes. From then on he was prevented from playing in big venues for many years. State radio and television also wouldn’t broadcast his songs for quite a while. Although his music is now played without any fuss, one of his songs, called “the Last Bullet”, is so openly political that it is still banned nowadays.

The song I am introducing here is by far Cui Jian’s most well-known piece, which propelled him to stardom in 1986. The title is difficult to translate, but it is a chéngyǔ (a Chinese saying which usually consists of four characters) which basically means “not to have a penny to one’s name”. The lyrics seem to be addressed to a girl who is scorning the singer because he has no possessions. Many have seen it as actually addressing the Chinese government or Chinese society in the name of the restless youth of the time. Although most of Cui Jian’s music has aged rather badly in my view, this song really rocks. The video below is of a famous live version. For the original, click here. For the lyrics and their English translation, click here.

3) 睡在我上铺的兄弟 (Brother who slept on the bunk above me) by 老狼 （Lao Lang, or Old Wolf）

An old hit from 1994 by Beijing singer Lao Lang (meaning “Old Wolf”). The song is a nostalgic recollection of the singer’s university days, addressed to his old roommate (the “brother who slept in the bunk above”). It is particularly poignant in China, where for many people being an undergraduate student is their only moment of relaxation and freedom, which comes after they have spent their school days cramming like mad to pass the Gao Kao (end of high school examination), and before they graduate and have to face the pressure of working and fulfilling their family’s huge expectations.

4) 龙的传人 (descendants of the dragon) by 王力宏 (Wang Leehom)

This song, by the famous Chinese American singer Wang Leehom, is actually a cover version of a famous 1978 Taiwanese song written by Hou Dejian, and first song by Li Jianfu. The original version is a patriotic ode to China, which expresses the singer's yearning for the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, even though he may never see them (something especially relevant in Taiwan). It also makes reference to China's defeat during the Opium Wars, and ends with an exortation for the mighty dragon which is China to "open its eyes".

Wang Leehom's version dates from the year 2000. It turns the original ballad into a rap song, and modifies the content. Some English rap verses are added in the middle, where the singer talks about how his parents emigrated from Taiwan to the US. The final verses are also changed, and talk about the yearning of Chinese emigrants in other countries for the motherland. Curiously, Leehom is the second cousin of Li Jianfu, the original singer. To see the lyrics and their English translation, click here.

5) 天路 (Sky Road) by 韩红 (Hán Hóng)

This song talks about the historic railroad which the Chinese have built from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet. It's sung by Hán Hóng, a famous Chinese singer with a Tibetan mother and a Han father, who was born in Tibet. It is a beautiful song, and very well known in China. At the same time, the song is of course unashamedly patriotic and aims to glorify the Chinese authorities' efforts to develop Tibet. It also presents the typical image of Tibet as the romantic land of mystery which the Chinese imagine it to be.