Alternative culture promises a revolution
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In terms of yuan and fen, it might not make much of a dent in China's struggle to grow its service industry and domestic consumption base, but one of the most interesting, if little-heralded, stories in China must be the very rapid growth over the past few years of a genuine alternative culture. The audience is still small, but it is growing fast.
In many ways it resembles the tiny alternative scenes of New York and San Francisco in the early 1960s which, less than a decade later, had transformed the US and the world.
China has had rock 'n' roll for more than two decades, but for much of this time, what excited attention around the world was not so much the quality of the music but simply the fact that it existed. The mainland's visual arts scene was much better known and much more respected than its music scene during recent years, although whether for its quality or for the soaring art prices and status-conscious collectors is still an open question.
But all this seems to be changing. Suddenly, alternative Chinese musicians are the buzz in New York and Berlin, and are praised by leading critics around the world - The New Yorker's Alex Ross, for example, listed 23-year-old Zhang Shouwang's solo performance in Beijing in March last year as one of the top 10 classical music performances of the year.
Underground musicians and artists, the vast majority based in Beijing but with important colonies in cities like Wuhan, Nanjing and Shanghai, have suddenly emerged on the scene and seized the imagination of a small but growing group of young Chinese college students.
While the artists who comprise Beijing's Cult Youth collective achieve fame for their violent comic-book imagery and rock 'n' roll posters, their friends in the underground, experimental and avant garde music scenes are making greater inroads on both Chinese and international audiences.
In March, in a tour that has already begun to build up the trappings of legend, the undisputed heroes of China's underground, Carsick Cars, joined another much-admired band, The Gar, to embark on a 23-city tour of China, playing to packed clubs in cities that had never before seen or been interested in a band from Beijing. Just five years ago such a tour would have been unthinkable.
When it was over, Carsick Cars flew off to Barcelona to play in front of 80,000 music fans, alongside the likes of Neil Young and Sonic Youth.
It is too early to say that China's alternative culture scene is a large and important part of Chinese youth culture, but the speed with which it is growing, the ferocious loyalty it generates among its young followers around the country, and the sheer quality of the work is likely to make it a major cultural force in China and the world, and ultimately a force in business too.
The number of fans around China is growing very quickly, and websites dedicated to new music, which attracted mere hundreds of viewers even a few years ago, now regularly report tens of thousands of hits every day.
Already the savviest marketers, like Converse and Jagermeister, have begun supporting the scene, with the former rumoured to be about to employ a Carsick Cars song as the soundtrack to their newest global television campaign.
China is clearly a rising economic and political power, but except for its ability to produce precise but soulless practitioners of western classical music, or unbearably slick and derivative artists whose value is measured primarily in auction prices, most of us have trouble thinking of China as capable of creating exciting new currents in the world of contemporary art.
And yet our stereotypes are in the process of being overthrown.
In the next five years China's tiny alternative culture scene, like its counterpart in the US in the mid-1960s, is about to become a major force in China and the world.
Michael Pettis is a professor of finance at the Guanghua School of Peking University and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment
