In the field of Popular Music Studies, research about Chinese popular music has been mainly focused on the pop-rock of the last 40 years since the beginning of the reforms and opening-up policy which began in 1978. Because of cultural and political factors, local scholars tend to see the period between 1949 and 1978 as an pop-vacuum era, in which popular music was rarely discussed and even regarded as a taboo. However, the so-called ‘vacuum’ does not equate to ‘nothing at all’, but represents a genesis with significance for the following generations. In this sense, Jones's monograph Circuit Listening helps to fill a gap by exploring Chinese popular music in the 1960s, aspiring to portray a sonic history of the musical revolutions in those years from a non-Chinese perspective. Importantly, Jones's approach is insightfully based on a global ‘unified field theory’ stance. In short, he notes that the 1960s did not see merely the hegemonic power of the stylistic norms and musical forms of British and American counterculture, but also other cultural movements, such as Red Guards in China, which erupted in 1966. Here he makes a vital contribution to considerations of the meaning of popular music in the 1960s.

The book's key concept is ‘circuit’, a wise and fascinating metaphor with two connotations. The first is technological. It is now common sense that the development of popular music has been closely related to the development of technology. By highlighting transistor radio's impact on musical practices and aesthetics in China between the 1950s and the 1970s, Jones defines its function as an unprecedentedly pervasive socialist media network promoting the dissemination of popular music within mainland China, while also acting as an agent for the realisation of the sonic exchange between the mainland and those more Westernised areas such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. At a more detailed level, ‘circuit’ presents cultural and geopolitical meanings. In Jones's usage, it refers to particular linguistic, ideological and economic pathways, along which a series of music genres can travel. Different circuits run on different power sources and are designed for divergent purposes.

The narrative begins with the song ‘The East Is Red’ – a paean to Chairman Mao Zedong and also the name of China's first man-made satellite. Here the subtle connection between music and social revolution indicated political fanaticism. In ways similar to a form of Beatlemania in a Chinese version or the use of church bells in medieval Europe, this song conveyed a strong sense of collectivity and became a soundtrack of the Cultural Revolution. Rather than analysing what is being sung in the song, Jones is more concerned with the mode of its transmission, from which its aesthetics and ideology can be discerned. In doing this, he creates a sonic background of the 1960s and reveals an alternative sort of revolution in communication.

The book is well structured according to the logic of Jones's arguments. Chapter one takes Hong Kong-based diva Grace Chang and her musical style (such as Afro-Caribbean influenced mambo and calypso, and jazz-inflected ‘modern song’) as a case study to answer questions about how we make sense of music that is produced at the same time but in different social or geographical locales. It further illustrates how certain popular music genres can serve as a kind of ‘portmanteau’ to reinforce the increasingly global reach of mass media. Chapter two moves back to the mainland and focuses on the juxtaposition of distinctive ‘quotation songs’ and improved broadcasting networks to explore the ways in which popular music of this period became an integral component of the transistorised media landscape or, in other words, an important instrument of government propaganda. The following four chapters can be read as a single topic on Taiwanese popular music under several cultural impacts, especially those of Japan, the USA, mainland immigrants and Taiwanese aborigines. The topic runs through Taiwanese-language musical and movie songs, the tension between Western pop and local folk music under the influence of piracy, the Chinese traditions revived and reformed in Chen Da's folk songs and the media-ecological value of Teresa Teng's music as an alternative circuit connecting the different ideological camps.

Circuit Listening is undoubtedly a contribution to both the Chinese and general academic worlds of popular music, especially for its abundant and detailed information, data and archives, which can serve as foundation for any further explorations of the early history of Chinese popular music. In his writing strategy, instead of simple and sequential story-telling, the author has arranged his work thematically according with a media and communication logic and effectively built a theoretical framework, like another ‘closed circuit’. More significantly, from a methodological point of view, Jones's work is of particular value for Popular Music Studies by expanding the spatial horizon of a certain period within the global context of the day.

However, despite the wonderful and beneficial reading experience I encountered here, it should be noted that the book is not easy reading. Jones's discourse covers a range of academic fields such as culture, sociology, industry, media and musicology: this could be a potential barrier for the general reader. Moreover, as a mainland local scholar, I am still confused by the question of how ‘Chinese popular music’ is defined here: culturally, geographically, historically, or even stylistically? It seems that Jones has utilised a broad sense of popular music as a sort of mass music (大众音乐) in some parts of the book (such as the quotation songs), but also in a narrower sense as pop music (流行音乐) in others (such as the case of Teresa Teng). This is one of the most distinctive tensions that informed the identity of early Chinese pop in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, the narrative in the book features a relatively strong Western orientation, as an inevitable outcome from different cultural stances by Jones. As a local scholar, I may tend to highlight the dialectical and positive significance of such a ‘problem’ and so underplay Jones's achievements. After all, a comprehensive understanding of Chinese pop can never be obtained only by inside observers, but also – and perhaps sometimes more effectively sometimes – by looking at it from an outside angle.