Youth and Memory: Understanding Participatory Culture in Contemporary Mandopop among China's Millennials

Mandopop, as a distinctive genre of Chinese popular music, has accomplished a flourishing scene within a few decades. A recent observation has demonstrated a phenomenon that reflects how China's millennial audience participates in media platforms to exhibit idiosyncrasies defined by their memory and experience, seeking for the individual participation in Mandopop. By making use of a qualitative research design based on phenomenology, the study reviewed the participatory culture in Mandopop among China's millennials from their perspectives. Ten participants were sampled through purposive sampling, and data was collected through semi- structured one-on-one interviews. The rationale was to investigate how China's millennials characterize and interpret their daily participation in experiencing Mandopop. The findings demonstrate that China's millennials deem Mandopop as an important, integral part of their lifetime and even in their youth and memory. It can offer an insight on how Mandopop fans establish their own position in order to find cultural identity and cultural memory in the mediatized context. The study concludes that participatory culture is an important theoretical domain to understand audience groups in popular music, and to build a media environment in which individuals can actively participate and share popular music content, rather than remaining passive consumers.