The history of Cantopop is the history of Hong Kong – and perhaps its grim future
For a surprising number of Hong Kongers of a certain age, April 1, 2003 was more momentous than July 1, 1997. Sure, 1997 may have been when the then-British colony was returned to China – a handover marked by a since-corroded promise by the Chinese Communist Party to maintain “one country, two systems” for 50 years – but six years later brought the death of Leslie Cheung, ripping out Hong Kong’s cultural soul.
When Mr. Cheung died by suicide at 46, tens of thousands of Hong Kongers attended his memorial service, even amid the raging SARS epidemic. He remains an outsize presence in the city to this day, through annual memorials and tributes: Families in Hong Kong and from its diaspora – mine included – have effectively canonized the man so beloved he was nicknamed “Older Brother,” as well as his fellow tragic figure in the Cantopop world, Anita Mui, the “Madonna of Asia” who also died young in 2003.
Ms. Ho, like Mr. Cheung, is a gay Cantopop star; Ms. Mui, who in 1989 supported the protesters in Tiananmen Square, was Ms. Ho’s mentor. Yet her arrest has elicited only a muffled response in Hong Kong, where harsh crackdowns have quieted protests against Beijing’s national security law. The Cantopop industry, neutered by decades of plunging sales and crushed by South Korea’s massive K-pop machine as today’s defining East Asian sound, has been muted.
Historically, Cantopop’s lyrics only occasionally flick at Hong Kong politics, but it is nonetheless political. While the genre had scored hits since its creation in the 1920s, as University of Hong Kong professor Stephen Yiu-Wai Chu wrote in his book,its golden age – from the late-1970s to the 1990s – timed precisely with a period of enormous economic and political growth in Hong Kong.