Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow : Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Connotations

Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan¿s unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese¿language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow explores Mandopop¿s surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for twenty years.