To this point, Fu understood the rock song “I Have Nothing” (Yi wu suo you , 1986; Ex 2) from Cui Jian, the most influential rock musician in the 1980s, as signifying a breakthrough in the way of expressing emotion from “conceptual words” to direct “outcry”. Although Cui himself has stated that “I Have Nothing” is merely a male-female love song, this piece was widely taken by Chinese scholars as emblematic of humanist expression in the pop song of the 1980s, pointing to its messages of human nature, existence, and self-consciousness.6 It was also taken by several Western scholars as a marginal cultural expression which contained an anti-state message. For instance, Baranovitch interprets the title phrase “I Have Nothing” as the articulation of spiritual and material impoverishment of Cui’s disillusioned generation (2003: 32-33), and Jones hears it as an allegory of the deprivation of the generation’s emotional and political rights (1992: 137).