Charles A. Laughlin is Ellen Bayard Weedon Chair Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia. He has published extensively on Chinese literature from the 1920s-1960s, including two books: Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience(Duke, 2002) and The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (Hawai’i, 2008), and edited Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature (Palgrave, 2005).
Dao Lang’s latest studio album, "There Are Few Folk Songs," with its incorporation of multiethnic instruments and strange rhythms, has touched a nerve among the Chinese public. Listen very carefully and you just might hear the cracks forming in China’s pop culture edifice.
