Every busker dreams of making the jump from singing for passers-by to landing a recording contract. Sun Heng and Xu Guojian did just that. Seven years ago, they worked on construction sites and delivered water during the day, while playing the underpasses and subway stations of Beijing at night. Now, they're the driving force behind New Labour, a band known across the mainland and whose CDs sell 100,000 copies.
But few rock stars use all proceeds from album sales to fund a school for the children of migrant workers, or open a museum dedicated to recording the migrant worker experience, as Sun and Xu have done. Their story is no rags-to-riches tale, nor do they fit the stereotype of a mainland musician.
The unassuming pair have nothing in common with the students and self-consciously hip twentysomethings who inhabit Beijing's underground rock clubs. With their cheap clothes and five-yuan (HK$5.60) haircuts, they are worlds apart from typical pop stars. Instead, Sun, 34, and Xu, 32, look like the migrant labourers they once were and they have no intention of changing.
'I don't feel like a rock star. I feel like I have a lot more in common with migrant workers than other musicians,' says Xu, who plays bass in the band.
He and Sun never set out to become famous. 'When we founded the band in 2002, the idea was very simple. We wanted to entertain migrant workers,' says Sun. His younger brother, Sun Yuan, who plays keyboards, and drummer Jiang Gouliang make up the rest of the band.
Just as Woody Guthrie wrote songs that summed up the experience of US migrant workers during the Great Depression, so New Labour's music is aimed at the estimated 200 million migrant workers on the mainland. A blend of folk and rock, with traditional Chinese elements thrown in, their songs have titles such as Day Worker and City Life and lyrics that resonate with the manual labourers who make up the majority of their fans.