Chinese rock music enthusiasts should never forget May 9, 1986.

On that very evening, a concert in Beijing commemorating the Year of World Peace opened a new page for China's pop music.

Besides the unprecedented scale of participation of 128 ace singers, this concert witnessed the birth of China's homegrown rock music. During the concert, Cui Jian, known as the godfather of Chinese rock music, in peasant clothing sporting uneven length trouser legs, hopped onto the stage and blurted out "I once kept on asking again and again, 'When would you go with me?" That was from his song Nothing to My Name. Off stage there was dead silence initially, but when the song was over, the amazed crowd burst into hoorays and applause.

Cui's shouts awakened any remaining deaf ears to rock music in China. The words "rock music" lodged deep in people's hearts overnight. Before long, young people all over China were banging out Cui tunes on beat-up guitars in campus dormitories across the mainland.

The pulsating 1980s witnessed the establishment of Cui Jian and other big-name bands like Tang Dynasty, Cobra, and the Panthers, with more rockers swarming into the camp.

Rock music was destined to brand itself with Chinese characteristics since its first import into China. Popular rock bands skillfully integrate Chinese music instruments like bamboo flutes, gongs, zithers and Chinese mandolins. Folk art like Xiangsheng (comic dialogue) and Er'renzhuan (a song-and-dance duet originating in Northeast China), or even Chinese operas have been known to crop up in rock amid electronic guitars, drums, and bass. Rock songs boasting the essence of Chinese values also abound.

However, since the end of the 1990s, rock music in Chinese mainland has been severely threatened by commercially run pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

In the struggle between the ideal of independent art and the reality of the commercial world, many rockers chose to submit to the real world, or at least tried to find a balance between the two. They are seen by insiders as traitors to the spirit of independent rock.