Congratulations to Yili Zhou on her recent dissertation defence. Her thesis is titled Headbanging on the Open Door: heavy metal music, globalization, and politics in contemporary China and her supervisor is Professor Jeremy Paltiel.
My doctoral dissertation focuses on state and society relations in China in the context of globalization through the case study of heavy metal music in China. It is built around extensive field research in the heavy metal music scene in China. Using rich empirical materials generated from this research, it takes a deep dive into the cultural transformation in China concomitant with the globalization process. It shows how the Party-State accommodates to the cultural dissonance of heavy metal music in the course of its own strategic embrace of globalization while the metalheads maneuver to express their cultural preferences under the double gaze of the Chinese Party-state and global capitalism. The research illuminates another side of the China story often left untold – that the state-society relations in China are much more complex and dynamic than what is expressed and implied in the word “authoritarianism”. In particular, it unveils the inconspicuous yet significant aspects of the undertow of globalization and demonstrates how globalization insinuates itself into the blurring and fluid boundaries between the Chinese state and society. In doing so, it links the structure of China’s political system and global capitalism with the agency of mundane individuals, and shows how the metalheads in China find themselves somewhere between the domestic political hegemony of the Party and the cultural hegemony of the modern West.