This article aims to examine the significance of modernity in Chinese disco back to the 1980s. The open-door policy allowed disco to quickly become a remarkable symbol of modernity related to the United States, where the popular culture and modern lifestyle appealed to millions of Chinese people. The Disco Fever 1985–1989 demonstrated their enthusiasm to reintegrate into the global society by consuming the “same” popular music and culture. Being drawn into the debates between tradition and fashion, communism and capitalism, and arts and commerce, the modernity of Chinese disco was not a forward or sideways or backward process theorized by Liang Shuming, but an attitude toward all directions to cope with the dilemma of materialism, exoticism, and desire triggered by the economic reform. This modernity was an imagination coproduced by global agents, each offering distinctive capitals to transform China’s society throughout the 1980s.
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