“World music”, which appeared in the West in the 1980s as a marketing/classificatory device of the music industry, usually refers to non-Western music or fusion of Western and non-Western music. The all-inclusive concept becomes even more ambiguous when it is adopted into the Chinese language. However, more and more Chinese musicians are making use of the term to promote their music to a wider audience, both nationally and internationally. Ethnic minority musicians find this new market of “world music” useful to sell their marginalized music. Han Chinese musicians are also inspired by “world music” to draw from their traditions and mix it with other music languages. For the Shanghai government, “world music” is in accordance with its imaging of the city’s position as an international metropolis. Thus it sponsored the World Music Shanghai, China’s first world music festival, as one of the events to celebrate the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. A number of other world music festivals have been born in China since then, often with the sponsorship of real estate companies, who do so to promote their brands. What does “world music” mean in the Chinese context?

Mr. Mu Qian is a Chinese performing arts curator, ethnomusicologist, and writer. He received his M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the China Conservatory in 2005, and B.A. in English Language and Literature from Nanjing University in 1997.Mu has served as Music Director of World Music Shanghai and MOMA Post Mountain Music-Art Festival in Beijing, two festivals dedicated to introducing music from around the world to the Chinese audience as well as presenting Chinese music with a global perspective. Mu has recently received a fellowship of the Asian Cultural Council to do research on world music and observe arts administration practices in Washington D.C. and New York from March to October 2014.