一無所有

On 9 May 1986 Cui Jian walked onto a televised music competition with his band ADO and sang a song he had written himself. Nothing to My Name caused a sensation. It was one of the first pieces of Chinese, rather than imported, rock to win a following at home, and it made Cui a cult figure among urban youth almost overnight. On the surface it is a love song: a young man worries that a girl scorns him because he has nothing to offer, then grows bolder, taking her hands and suggesting she might love him precisely for having nothing. But the title, a four-character idiom with no grammatical subject, can mean I have nothing or we have nothing, and listeners heard a generation addressing the nation. Young people in the 1980s were watching the country drop Maoist ideals for rapid economic change while they felt short of opportunity and freedom. Some even read it as an ironic answer to the Chinese words of The Internationale, which promise the opposite. The sound mattered too: Cui gave the instrumental hook to a suona, the shrill Chinese reed horn, played by Liu Yuan, rather than an electric guitar. By 1989 it had become the anthem of the student movement, and Cui sang it at the Tiananmen Square protests, where students jumped up to sing along. Afterwards he was restricted to small venues and did not play a large Beijing concert again until 2005. The song remains one of the most influential ever written in the People's Republic.