China Peking Rock

By Anastasia Toufexis.

Kaleidoscopic spotlights flashed. A slick crew of singers and musicians, led by a pair of go-go dancers in skimpy black-leather skirts, gyrated rhythmically as two boyish British rockers strutted and sang. Amplified music boomed. The sight was familiar: a concert by the British hit group Wham! But the setting, Peking's Workers' Stadium, was not. Neither was the reaction. The group's visit to China last week, the first by a major Western rock group, was met largely with politeness and puzzlement by the audience, which included more than 6,000 Chinese.

Most of the crowd, ranging from teenagers to high-ranking officials, watched expressionless, riveted to their hard folding seats throughout the 1 1/2-hour performance. More plugged-in listeners tapped their fingers on their laps or gently swayed their heads. After hearing Wham!'s hits, including top moneymaker Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, a young Chinese music student offered her opinion: "All it does is make people crazy."

But many of the almost 4,000 foreigners present, most of them students, had no such inhibitions, and they whistled, cheered and even danced in the aisles. A few adventurous Chinese joined them, to the consternation of green-uniformed policemen who kept trying to push them back to their seats, sometimes manhandling those who resisted. Such Western-style antics got little sympathy from the better behaved. "A bunch of liumangs (hoodlums)," smirked a 27- year-old Chinese college student. "Such a raucous response was not necessary."

A more bizarre performance came from a band member flying to Canton for Wham!'s second concert. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, a backup trumpeter went berserk and stabbed himself in the stomach with a pocketknife. The musician then forced his way into the cockpit, briefly sending the airliner into a nose dive, before being subdued by guards.

One regrettable effect of the visit by Wham! is likely to be an intensification of the debate over the "open door" policy to Western influences espoused by Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping. Increasingly, critics are warning that cultural imports will lead to "spiritual pollution." But the demand for Western fare is insatiable: a disco craze is sweeping the nation; Radio Peking carries a weekly hourlong program of contemporary Western music; five American films, among them Star Wars and Coal Miner's Daughter, are being shown in many cities.

The Wham! concerts are a significant sign of the government's new permissiveness, begun last year. Just five years ago, rock 'n' roll was denounced as "decadent" and said to be a cause of rape, prostitution and drug addiction. But the judgment on Wham!'s music by Zhou Renkai, an official of the All-China Youth Federation, which invited the group, was that it was "very healthy for the youth."

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Peking