Sound of the Streets: China’s Singer Zhou Yunpeng

Zhou Yunpeng’s ballad is about an issue that is extremely topical in urban China today. He sings about people becoming the slaves of their mortgages as soon as they can afford to buy a flat. People who work themselves to the bone, until they’re old and grey. The price to pay for entering the middle-class.

Zhou's Inspiration

Although the blind singer cannot see what is going on in the supposedly booming, new China with his own eyes, his lyrics are spot on -- he understands the Zeitgeist and describes the trials of those left behind by the sprint towards prosperity compellingly:

“The ideas and themes of my music come from two sources mainly -- my experiences when I travel and my reading.”

The vagabond traveller

Zhou Yunpeng has travelled all over China. He was a wondering busker for years. He would sleep on hard train station floors. He would be shooed away from busy shopping districts by the police. He was constantly on the go:

“Once, I was at the University of Xining in the western province of Qinghai. I was sitting in front of the student hostel, singing. Everyone opened their windows and listened. Later, they called me into a room, like at a press conference. Then the students filled my rucksack with food and drinks and I moved onto the next city.”

It could be his life as a vagabond that makes him sound so authentic. In a biting song called Chinese Children he advises: “Don’t be a child of Chengdu parents, a drug addicted mother doesn’t go home for seven days and nights,” “Don’t be a child of Henan parents, AIDS in the blood laughs out loud, Don’t be a child of Shanxi parents, your father will become a lump of coal -- make sure the mine doesn’t collapse.”

The second hand guitar

Zhou grew up in a poor suburb of the industrial city of Shenyang in China’s northeast. His life changed when his parents bought him a second-hand guitar in the 1980s.

“We lived in Shenyang in a narrow alley. My musical training came from the kids on the street -- they had long hair and wore flares. That was the ‘in thing’ at the time. Almost every night, I would listen to an Australian radio station that played songs from Taiwan and Hong Kong. That was my training -- foreign radio and street kids.”

Tapes of Western music were rare and precious. Zhou would listen to music by the Doors, the Beatles, Bob Marley and the likes.

But he was not able to pursue a musical career himself at first. Nobody took his passion for music, literature and poetry seriously. Like many blind people in China, he ended up at a school for the blind and learnt how to massage:

“I didn’t like the work and so I just took off. (...) When there’s a will there’s a way.”

He’s been singing ever since. And he is no longer “on the go” but lives in a high-rise building in Beijing. On most nights, the long-haired musician with dark glasses can be found on stage in one of the capital’s bars or clubs. Singing about those forgotten and ignored by the economic boom.

Author: Ruth Kirchner
Editor: Anne Thomas