Outline significant trends in popular Chinese music since the 1930s
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• From the 1930s, film songs performed by small, Western-style, jazz/pop bands accompanying a pentatonic melody sung by a female film star became popular. Often these songs presented lyrics with charming romantic imagery, but some films carried a message about social inequalities.
• In 1949, following the Communist victory in a bitter civil war, the popular music industry shifted to Taiwan and Hong Kong where it was shaped by new trends in Western and Japanese music as well as by the dual roles of singers as popular film stars. Meanwhile, the mainland saw the promotion of mass singing as part of political campaigns in place of popular music.
• By the 1980s, popular music began to return to mainland China, through imported foreign styles and the rise of a variety of indigenous popular music styles such as Northwest style, Chinese rock, and karaoke. Gradually--and even in Hong Kong--Cantonese and Taiwanese dialect lyrics have been dropped for those in Mandarin, as that represents the largest market.
• The current internationalization of contemporary Chinese music is exemplified by the Twelve Girls Band and their electronically mediated arrangements of Chinese music performed on traditional musical instruments such as erhu and pipa.
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