Contesting and Appropriating Chineseness in Sinophone Music

china perspectives T he first special issue of China Perspectives on "Sinophone Musical Worlds" (2019/3) laid the theoretical foundation for a musical approach to Sinophone studies (Amar 2019). This first issue emphasised the importance of a "place-based" analysis of the global circulation of artistic creations, promoted in the field of Sinophone studies by Shu-mei Shih (2007), and in cultural studies by Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet (2013) as well as Marc Moskowitz ( The articles covered a wide range of subjects, each highlighting specific modalities of circulation of sounds, affects, and identities across the Sinophone world, be it in Cantonese-speaking communities with radio broadcasts (Lam 2019), in Xinjiang with musical performances viewed as part of a systemic state policy of cultural re-education (Anderson and Byler 2019), in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music with the adaptation of Western techniques (Grenier Borel 2019), or through an appropriation of Korean pop music in Chinese TV shows