The claim that post-punk lies at the foundation of Chinese indie rock has more than a little truth to it. Chinese rock history, which opened in the 1980s, passed through a 1990s dominated by metal and hard rock before undergoing what can only be described as a tectonic shift at the turn of the century. The story resists oversimplification, but the band that deserves attention as its source is P.K.14, formed in 1997. China’s first post-punk band began their life in Nanjing before later taking root in Beijing, establishing rock as an art form in the capital. In other words, it suggests that in China, the very concept of indie rock began with post-punk.

The Dawn of Chinese Rock and Post-Punk

Chinese rock in the 1980s took shape by modelling itself on contemporary Western popular music, and it reflected new wave from the very start. Cui Jian, “the father of Chinese rock,” was a devoted Sting listener from the beginning and developed a deep affinity for reggae. Dou Wei, singer of the hard rock band Black Panther, was acutely attuned to the British and American alternative rock of his day; after leaving the band, he consciously embraced a gothic rock aesthetic, and his 1994 solo album Black Dream_ even has some reggae in it.

You could frame both of them as post-punk, but it’s difficult to call either the dawn of the genre in China. Their music was understood only within the broad category of “rock,” and their styles were not carried forward.

The band that introduced the concept of “post-punk” to China’s rock scene was P.K.14, formed in 1997 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. According to Hua Dong (华东) of Rebuilding The Rights of Statues (Re-TROS), a former P.K.14 drummer, when he visited Beijing in 1999, post-punk was completely unknown in the capital, the center of Chinese rock. Rock in China at that point meant mostly metal bands, with punk making up much of the rest. Grunge and Britpop were around too, I suppose.

Nanjing, which produced P.K.14, is known for having embraced post-punk early and is often called the “post-punk capital.” China has many kinds of capitals. Punk and metal certainly dominated there as they did elsewhere, but the dark melodies and sharp guitar tones of post-punk also found a strong following.

The Rock Scene of a Post-Punk City in the 1990s

The Birth of the Nanjing Rock Scene

It was Tang Dynasty, with their debut album in 1992, that first opened the door to rock in Nanjing. As elsewhere, their arrival was a landmark moment — especially for young people. Fired up by this homegrown hard rock arriving from Beijing, a small community coalesced around rock music, and from it came many bands.

Rock music enthusiasts have always been a minority everywhere, and places where you could encounter something that niche were limited. The gathering point where music-hungry young people collected and formed friendships was the 军人俱乐部 (Army Club). A rather imposing name, but the Army Club had its origins as a welfare facility for military personnel that was opened to the public in the 1980s — and became Nanjing’s largest entertainment complex. Shopping center, arcade, skating rink, karaoke: essentially a mall. Within it, one of the country’s largest bookstores, the Yangtze Delta Cultural Publications Market (长三角文化出版物市场), was simultaneously one of its finest music retailers and stocked no small number of bootlegs. The name, incidentally, refers to the Yangtze River Delta.

Hard rock and metal were the dominant tastes in the Nanjing rock scene of the time, but they were also holding Kurt Cobain memorial shows, which shows how comprehensively and in real time they were keeping up with the wider world. The music market expanded year by year, and eventually bars devoted to playing rock appeared.

The community of rock lovers in this city was small, but its energy was intense. They put out fanzines, pushed their way into radio stations to get rock music on air, held concerts in bars, argued passionately about what new music should be, and retreated into underground air-raid shelters to play at ear-splitting volume.

Hua Dong at the time was in a two-piece band called Corpse (胴体), and apparently drew stares from audiences and organizers alike for thrashing around on stage at local shows. What style of music they were playing has not really come down to us, but it was probably some kind of punk. There was also contact with punk figures from Beijing and Wuhan — the so-called “punk capital” — who had their own rhizome-like network across the country, drifting between cities.

Rock music is, of course, itself an imaginary product of rebellion and resistance; but a particular emphasis on its countercultural dimension was a defining characteristic of the Nanjing rock circle at this time. As a result, punk, metal, and folk song coexisted among them under the umbrella of protest music. The “folk” in question refers not to traditional music but to the American folk revival. Things that had diverged in the West were being appreciated here by returning to their common essence.

Surrealist City, Post-Punk Capital

In the midst of this mongrel environment, post-punk began to attract serious attention around 1996. Being a small world, it spread fast and became a phenomenon.

One measure of post-punk’s popularity in the city at that time: The Cure. Almost everyone in Nanjing who listened to rock owned something by the British gothic rock band. Albums sold out as soon as they arrived and rarely appeared in shops, carrying price tags several times higher than anywhere else in the country.

Why did post-punk find such an audience in Nanjing? One theory holds that the gloom and lassitude cultivated in Nanjing people by its bitterly cold winters and swelteringly humid summers naturally resonated with dark, heavy music. A terrible prejudice, I think.

The interests of Nanjing’s rock enthusiasts at the time extended well beyond music to literature, film, and contemporary art. The artwork for Nanjing Underground Music Record 97-98 (南京地下音乐记录 97-98), a self-produced omnibus cassette featuring bands active in the city, used a Munch lithograph. Look carefully at the documents and testimonies from that period and you can see how thoroughly surrealism and Dadaism had permeated their sensibility. They defined their city, Nanjing, as a “surrealist metropolis.” They had likely found in post-punk not just a musical style but an attitude toward art and culture as a whole.

From within this milieu emerged P.K.14 in 1997 — the first band in the country to explicitly orient itself toward post-punk. Post-punk had already become a major current in the Nanjing rock circle since 1996. For now, let’s place 1997, the year of this band’s formation, as year zero of Chinese post-punk.

Yang Haisong and P.K.14

A Literary Youth’s Unlikely Encounter with Hard Rock

Yang Haisong, a literary-minded young man who favored Faulkner and Hemingway, was one member of this subculture. His taste for counterculture meant his favorite musicians naturally included Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Jim Morrison — a list that was largely shared across the small, close-knit Nanjing rock community of the time. As of 1994, he aspired to be a folk singer in the mold of Bob Dylan, and his distinctive vocal style may well trace back to that.

Around 1993, at around age twenty, he heard Tang Dynasty and understood that his destiny lay in rock music. He started writing three-chord songs on acoustic guitar, dropped out of university, and threw himself into creation while living frugally. Somewhere in there — it’s unclear whether literature or music came first — he fell under the spell of Beat literature, devoured books on Zen, Taoism, and existentialist thought, and set off on a wandering journey through Xinjiang. He later recalled this period as his hippie years.![[]]

The Encounter with Joy Division, and the Formation of P.K.14

Between 1995 and 1996, Yang Haisong formed several bands and continued performing with other local groups in the basement shelters of apartment buildings around the city. No recordings survive, but they were probably punk-leaning. The wave of punk rock had already reached Nanjing around 1995, and many young people who had been devoted to folk music cut their long hair and plunged into the punk scene.

It was not long after his transition from folk singer to punk singer that Yang Haisong discovered Joy Division in 1996. In his own telling: he heard them and didn’t really get it at first, but when he listened again a little while later, he was overwhelmed. What happened in the interval has never been explained, but that’s the kind of thing that happens.

In 1997, Yang Haisong folded his existing band and founded a new one with a clear post-punk orientation. That band was P.K.14 (originally The PK 14). The official founding date is given as November, though activity seems to have begun around summer — the bassist started learning her instrument that summer. The band played their first show in December at Nanjing Normal University, and went on to become the most important band in the scene, occupying a central role.

The cryptic band name is generally explained as an abbreviation of “青春公共王国 Public Kingdom for Teens,” but this full name is apparently a post-hoc fabrication. Tired of being asked what the name meant, Yang Haisong ad-libbed something that was then officially adopted. He’s said so in multiple interviews, so it’s not in doubt.

Blue Moon (蓝色的月亮) , included on Nanjing Underground, is their earliest surviving recording and is considered one of the oldest extant post-punk recordings in China. The quality of the portable recorder used is not great, and the performance is not especially accomplished, but there is unmistakably an ethos distinct from punk, metal, or folk — and it’s also interesting that Yang Haisong’s lyrics and vocal style were already fully formed at this point.

The Post-Punk City Makes Its Move

In May 1999, P.K.14 played as the opening act for The (International) Noise Conspiracy in Shanghai, making a strong impression on rock fans around the country as a new wave arriving.

Around the following month, while the band was playing a show in Beijing, the CEO of indie label Modern Sky (摩登天空) approached them about recording. Waiting around for a date to be confirmed, they found half a year had passed without their noticing — and they simply stayed. Perhaps they had taken a polite offer at face value, but turning points in history have a way of hiding. From that point on, P.K.14 operated out of Beijing.

A demo version of Blue Moon appeared on a cassette included with the September issue of Modern Sky’s audio magazine — the same recording as the Nanjing Underground version. The same issue ran a feature on Nanjing, and you can imagine the impact these newcomers from the south made on Beijing’s music world.

Demos and Albums

A demo recorded in Nanjing in 2000 survives from the band’s Beijing period. Drummer Hua Dong had stepped away due to family circumstances, so a drum machine was used, giving the recording an even colder, more post-punk feel.

Crossing into 2001, the band began work on their debut album. Some sources mention the involvement of Canadian indie label Empty Egg, but whether that label actually existed is doubtful. I searched for a while and found no trace of it. There are signs that a Nanjing subculture circle had published books under the Empty Eggs name, and someone in the circle had probably studied in Canada.

After the first run was burned to CD-R, a pressed CD turn right immediately after up stair (上楼就往左拐) was released on Sub Jam, a label run by rock critic Yan Jun (颜峻). The publicly available samples run to twelve tracks, while the pressed version has nine. RAR file were apparently once available on the Sub Jam website, but the links are now dead — though it’s probably the same recording.

The debut album was well received at the time and announced to audiences in Beijing and beyond that a new wave had arrived. Yang Haisong’s own liner notes are included, with a warm account of the recording sessions — and the full lyrics for every track, which is a nice touch.

The Public Kingdom, Thereafter

The band relocated fully to Beijing and went through significant lineup changes. From 2002 onward, the lineup stabilized and their artistic vision grew sharper.

Having formally signed with Modern Sky, the band released their second album  (_Who Who Who and Who Who Who (谁谁谁和谁谁谁) in 2004. It was also their first recording made in a proper studio, and could reasonably be considered their true debut. The album secured their reputation as the finest indie rock band in the country. It’s worth noting in passing that 快 (Fast), one of their signature tracks on this album, is a cover of a song by Seven, Eight o’clock (七八点 Qī Bā Diǎn), a band they had run alongside during their Nanjing years.

What P.K.14 Meant

In a China where playing rock music was widely considered a student pastime, P.K.14 stands as one of the rare domestic bands that could hold its own against British and American alternative rock. They can be understood as having carved out a space for indie rock between the hobbyist amateur band and the pop-rock chart act. The post-punk style they introduced — and the fierce drive toward self-expression at its core — combined with their uncompromising DIY approach, must have been a tremendous inspiration for young musicians.

As Sonic Youth makes clear, post-punk has a particular affinity with avant-garde and experimental music, more so than most rock subgenres. When P.K.14 brought post-punk to Beijing, the city’s underground rock began to mix with those scenes and chart a course different from metal or punk. Rather than localizing through the blending of Chinese elements, it built an atmosphere and style distinctly its own. That situation is part of why foreign visitors to the Chinese capital in the early 2000s, confronted with this chaotic scene, were moved to declare it the most exciting city in the world.

The band continued to gig in and around Beijing, shaking up rock fans across the country. They toured internationally with considerable ambition, and were — setting aside metal — probably the most internationally recognized Chinese band of their era. They were sometimes called “China’s Sonic Youth,” which is now the kind of thing people laugh about. Nearly thirty years since the founding, a quarter-century with the current lineup — rare even by rock standards. COVID and busy schedules may account for some slowdown, but the band continues to release work. In late 2025 they put out their first studio album in seven years, incorporating bold elements of electronic and ambient music, reconfirming that this is a band still very much in the front rank, still in motion.

Appendix: The Many Faces of Yang Haisong

Yang Haisong wears many hats beyond his role as P.K.14’s vocalist. He releases experimental music under his own name alongside multiple side projects, and more recently has attracted attention for composing film scores and collaborating with pop artists. While remaining an active musician, he continues to publish his own poetry and fiction and has taken up translation — a writer’s life running in parallel. Since 2014 he has served as CEO of 兵马司 (Bīng Mǎ Sī / Beijing Independent Music), the Beijing indie label he helped found, and also runs his own label, Share The Obstacle. Every single one of his activities could spin out into a story of its own, but here I’ll limit myself to a few that made a particular impression.

李高特四重奏 (Lǐ Gāo Tè Sìchónzòu / Lygort Quartet)

In 2021, a mysterious three-piece called the Vladimirs — every member sporting a Russian-style surname and the first name Vladimir — suddenly dropped a release and caused a stir in rock circles. The truth turned out to be that all but the drummer were P.K.14 members. The drummer also plays as a P.K.14 support member, so the line between the two bands is blurry at best. The music is rawer, louder, and more primitive rock and roll — you could read it as a return to the post-punk roots they started from. The group has since added one more guitarist (also a P.K.14 member) and now goes by Lygort Quartet.

亲爱的艾洛伊丝 (Qīn’ài De Ài Luó Yī Sī / Dear Eloise)

Dear Eloise is a home-recording noise pop unit made up of the married couple Yang Haisong and 孙霞 (Sun Xia). They started making music together in 2008, simply because they both loved The Jesus and Mary Chain. The intimate, handmade, lo-fi sound is quite literally assembled in their bedroom. Though they work on the project purely as a hobby — releasing the occasional album or track quietly, with no live performances — they are recognized as one of the defining bands of the Beijing shoegaze scene. Sun Xia was also P.K.14’s original bassist, and after a serious illness in 2002 she stepped away from public musical life; but she seems to be doing well.

Old Yang as a Producer

Anyone who browses through the debut albums of Chinese indie bands will notice Yang Haisong’s name appearing as producer on a striking number of them — not only in post-punk and indie rock but in unexpected corners as well. His production career started with the debut album of Carsick Cars, which he took on essentially because there was no one else to do it. He initially declined, but came around when he felt the pull of passing on what he had learned to younger musicians. Since then, the number of albums he has been involved in has grown to the point that even he can’t give an exact count — probably around a hundred. Sessions often take place at his private studio, Psychic Kong. It can’t match a major studio for scale, but the advantage is that it’s affordable.

By all accounts, he rarely intervenes in what a band is doing, spending most of his time staring at the mixing board. Some find this frustrating, but it reflects a philosophy grounded in experience and conviction: that his job is not to direct a band but to help them do what they are already trying to do.

When he was young, Yang Haisong told people around him: “Even if there’s no hope of making a living from music, I’d love to run a small studio on the side and support younger musicians.”

References

病孩子 Sickbaby — https://www.sickbaby.org A Nanjing rock music community website, established in 1998. The bulk of this article is a rearrangement and condensation of material written on that site. Much has likely been lost in translation. The site contains not only music writing but original poetry and fiction as well.