‘The police were scared there would be riots': When Wham! took Western pop to China

Independent

06-04-2025

T he Beatles at JFK, this was not. 'Where's all the screaming kids, then?' George Michael asked, scanning the arrivals hall at Beijing international airport in April 1985 to find the wind whistling through the east Asian branch of Club Tropicana. Wham! arrived in China at the peak of their fame, yet rather than scrum their way through hordes of howling girls – as was the custom everywhere else – the doe-eyed pop phenomenon were met by a clutch of photographers, a hall full of nonplussed onlookers and a gathering of besuited government officials.
At least one of their welcoming party had brought his child, toddling up to Michael's bandmate Andrew Ridgeley in the uniform of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, getting a snapshot and then swiftly running away again. 'I think I scared the living daylights out of him,' Ridgeley chuckled, little knowing he'd just lived out a miniature metaphor for the first major Western pop tour of China, staged 40 years ago this week. At the rear, backing singer Janet Mooney was one of the 11-strong band accompanying George and Andrew into this uncharted, awkwardly officious territory. 'We'd never experienced anything like that,' she tells The Independent today. 'Everywhere we went they were mobbed, except in China. They had no experience of Western pop culture. I don't think they had that culture of fans waiting at the stage door and stuff.'
By 1985, these two Hertfordshire heartthrobs had conquered around 80 per cent of the globe. Instant smashes such as 'Young Guns (Go for It)' and 'Bad Boys' had made them overnight UK chart sensations, and their 1984 second album Make It Big had proven a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' and 'Careless Whisper' had topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, pushing the album to over 10 million in sales. In China, closed off to most Western music in the early Eighties, they were far less known. But Wham!'s two pioneering arena shows over 10 days there (Jean-Michel Jarre was the only Westerner to have played the country before, in 1981) were cued up as both a worldwide lap of honour for the band and the last word in barrier-shattering pan-cultural exchanges that would expand China's cultural vista for decades to come.
But behind its outward scenes of polite ambassadors' receptions and big bouffant pop thrills, the tour was routed through a world of oppression, manipulation and outright terror, its wheels greased by government payouts and with both the CIA and the Chinese secret police angling to control it for intelligence and propaganda purposes. The real reason for the absence of 1,000 hair-tearing fans doing the jitterbug across Beijing airport in the throes of Wham!-mania? Manager Simon Napier-Bell, mastermind and facilitator of the tour, had refused to pay the government to supply them.
That the tour happened at all was largely down to the machinations of one mysterious 'Professor Rolf'. Tasked in 1983 with making Wham! the biggest band in the world within 12 months (or lose their management contract), Napier-Bell and his Big Life Management partner Jazz Summers vowed to open up the band to China's potential market of 400 million 14-35-year-olds. On his first scouting trip, he spent days cold-calling ministers of the Chinese Communist Party, inviting them to lunch to discuss the huge investment potential of Western pop music, and got nowhere. Then, on a flight to Japan, he met a gentleman calling himself Professor Rolf, who had strings to pull. '[He] said he had contacts within the Chinese government and could help me,' Napier-Bell told Mojo in 2023.
Sure enough, on his next visit, Napier-Bell's lunch offer was taken up by a minor minister, then another, then another. During his regular monthly visits, he found himself wining and dining more than 140 government delegates to soften China's tight cultural borders for Wham!'s invasion. He even created brochures of a range of acts they might invite to bridge the East-West pop divide, sabotaging Queen's chances by presenting Freddie Mercury in particularly flamboyant style, but George Michael at his most wholesome.
Still, the Chinese authorities objected to Michael's more lascivious dance moves, insisting he avoid any such lewdness lest he pollute the spiritual purity of the nation's youth. The Minister of Culture put out a stern statement ahead of the shows. 'He basically advised the youth that were there to go to the concert and watch it but not learn from it,' Michael said in the tour film Wham! in China: Foreign Skies, 'which seems a pretty ridiculous thing to say.'
This, after all, was a country unacclimatised to the exultant sounds and immoral gyrations of global youth culture. Discos and dancing had only recently been legalised and there was no pop chart. Most foreign radio was blocked and fans of Western pop decadence were treated brutally. 'Back then, if we wanted to listen to pop music with lyrics like that, we had to do that in secret,' Wham!'s onstage presenter Kan Lijun told the BBC. 'If you were caught, you would be taken to the police station and they would keep you there all night. It was a time of many taboos.'
'I was a 15-year-old boy but I had to stay at home after 8.30pm,' a fan called Li Shizhong explained. 'At that time, if you played a guitar on the street, you would be considered a hooligan.' Naturally, pop music had become a signifier of the rising defiance amongst China's young guns and bad boys. 'I was dancing to [Wham!'s] music in underground disco and rock parties in my art school in Chongqing,' another fan, Rose Tang, told The Washington Post shortly before she became a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. 'The music was really instrumental in cultivating our rebellious spirit.'
Moreover, the tour's organisation became an increasingly tangled web, as the government insisted on the band using a 100-strong local crew at great expense and the US secret service attempted to turn the tour into a clandestine surveillance mission. 'Because we were dealing with this insular regime, the CIA were on my back; they wanted to pay me to work for them, but not tell anyone,' said Napier-Bell. He shunned the spooks' advances. 'I got to know a lot of Chinese secret police, they were a lot more clever.'
On arrival, Mooney was hit by a million-volt culture shock. 'It was a little bit like going back in time,' she says. 'It was very much still everyone on bicycles and [in] Mao jackets. It was completely different to how we perceive it now.' With a film crew and coterie of international journalists in tow, the Wham! entourage was carefully managed. Barred from wandering around on their own, they were ushered between formal dinners, sightseeing trips to the Great Wall and shopping jaunts, where Ridgeley bought a Mao jacket to go alongside his tartan suit stagewear.
The Chinese authorities objected to Michael's more lascivious dance moves, insisting he avoid any such lewdness lest he pollute the spiritual purity of the nation's youth.
Mooney recalls one eye-opening visit to a local market. 'I remember looking at this big open market stall covered in animal bits,' she says. 'There was a big tub beside me and a huge salamander came out of it. There was a woman walking along with these little strings of frogs and live chickens in a string bag. Stuff you don't really see at home.'
According to tour manager Jake Duncan, everywhere they went 'the band, and crew, were treated with a mix of feigned adulation and cultural perplexity'. The first show, at Beijing's 13,000 capacity Workers' Gymnasium on 7 April, was equally disorienting. While the band rocked through 'Club Tropicana', 'Wake Me Up…' and 'Young Guns (Go for It)' with their usual roof-lifting exuberance, the crowd – hemmed in by ranks of police officers – remained polite, subdued and all but motionless. 'You could feel the excitement, but they didn't really know how to respond to it,' says Mooney. 'No one had ever seen anything like that before,' said Lijun. 'We were used to people who stood still when they performed. All the young people were amazed, and everybody was tapping their feet. Of course, the police weren't happy and they were scared there would be riots.'
It later transpired that the Beijing audience was under strict instruction to remain seated. 'I foolishly asked the support act, a breakdancer called Trevor, to go down into the audience and get them all going, which unsettled the secret police,' Napier-Bell said. 'They made an announcement that everyone should stay in their seats.' It didn't help that Lindsay Anderson, the director of the tour film, requested the house lights be turned on for crowd shots, subduing an audience already afraid of retribution for seeming to enjoy themselves. There were reports that one of the more lively attendees was removed and beaten.
The result was one of the hardest shows Wham! ever played, the upper tiers of fans going relatively wild while the spotlit, camera-strewn stalls were rigid with fear. 'The first feeling was of failure,' Michael told Rolling Stone in 1986. 'There was no way we could communicate. And when we actually found out what had gone on I was just furious.'
Michael wasn't the only member of the touring party struggling with the experience. On the flight to the second show in Canton, Portuguese trumpeter Raul D'Oliveira suffered a psychotic episode, reportedly drawing out a knife and stabbing himself in the stomach while backing singers Pepsi & Shirlie stood screaming beside him. When he then forced his way into the cockpit, the pilot made an emergency dive to attempt to disarm and subdue him, and the plane briefly returned to Beijing to offload him into local psychiatric care.
'It was very traumatic for all of us,' says Mooney, 'mostly because we had to land a couple of times in bad weather and that was not great, and of course something not very nice was happening to a friend of ours.' The incident resulted in horrifying headlines back home and much stress on the tour. 'We had no way of contacting [our families],' Mooney says, 'We didn't have mobiles and stuff back then so we couldn't call them and tell them where we were or what we were doing after that plane thing, that everyone was alright.'
D'Oliveira suffered only minor injuries, the rest of the entourage was unharmed, and the two-date tour closed with a more permissive second show for 5,000 fans in the more Westernised Canton. 'Now our country has adopted an open policy, we have the chance to see this type of programme – we are so lucky,' one fan told Anderson's film crew, but the intended cultural explosion soon faltered. It would be 10 years before another major Western band – Roxette – would play in China.
Yet, before it went-went, the tour undoubtedly woke China up to the pizzazz and possibilities of Western pop music. Over the Eighties and Nineties, in Wham!'s image, local acts would develop a thriving homegrown market in Cantopop arena shows, and seeing people dancing around and playing guitars on stage for the first time was a revelation for many fans. 'In the early 1980s, pop songs from Hong Kong were very popular in mainland China,' music writer Wen Huang told the Indiana Times in 2016, 'and after the concert, college students and people in the music industry started to get interested in rock'n'roll.'
The tour made cultural ripples in China, but tsunamis across the rest of the world. 'Wham! were able to leapfrog from an initial, small, handful of satellite theatre dates, directly into outdoor stadiums in the most prestigious US markets,' says Duncan, whileNapier-Bell credits the global publicity around the tour for instigating the modernisation of communist China. 'When Wham! went to China, nobody in China knew they were there, but the whole of the rest of the world knew it,' he told Yahoo!. 'In the next 10 years, billions and billions and billions of dollars floated in. Modern Beijing was built from that money, really.' All of which, at the time, passed Wham! and their band by, like the PA announcements that kept the Wham! devotees of Beijing in check. 'It was a cultural experience like no one else had really ever had,' Mooney says. 'At the time, it's almost too big a situation for you to really understand what is happening.'