He Yong has died. The obituary released by his family confirms that he died on September 1, 2026, at the age of 57. (The Paper)
When I heard the news, I thought of him on the stage at Hung Hom. I also thought of a feeling that has been growing stronger, though I have never found it easy to put into words: a certain kind of force is slipping away from us.
I do not want to use his death as another occasion to declare that Chinese rock is dead. There are still many active rock musicians and bands today. Some are working seriously on their music; others are giving everything they have in tiny venues. My nostalgia for the past should not erase what they are doing now.
What I want to write about is how times change, and how people's inner lives change with them.
Why did Chinese rock in the 1980s and 1990s carry such force? I think one important reason was the powerful impulse people felt to express themselves.
Society was changing, life was changing, and many things once taken for granted could suddenly be questioned and imagined anew. Those changes struck directly at a person's understanding of the world. People felt excitement, confusion, anger, and the need to say so much. Even before they had worked it all out, they had to make a sound.
That inner vitality needed an outlet. Rock music gave it one.
That is why the music of that time can still hit us so hard. Decades have passed, and the recordings and images have aged, yet the people in them still have a vitality that comes straight at you. They were responding to the world they lived in, and their response was so strong that it had to become a song, had to be sung for someone else to hear.
He Yong was simply wonderful at the 1994 Hung Hom concert in Hong Kong. The music, his movements onstage, his live singing: together they had an energy so abundant it seemed about to spill over. Watching him, you could believe there really was that much inside him trying to burst out.
I have seen many concerts and music festivals since. The performers sing just as hard and throw themselves into their movements just as fully. Sometimes the stages are bigger, the lighting better, the sound more carefully produced. But for me, at least, the energy and presence He Yong had back then are hard to find again.
The movements can look similar. The force behind them may no longer be there.
He Yong's force was high-pitched and piercing. His music was like the lash of a whip driving a spinning top: one stroke, and feelings inside you that had begun to slow down would start stirring again.
He carried something of Beijing's hutongs, the sounds and feelings left by an older way of life. In “Bell and Drum Towers” especially, his gaze back was rooted in particular things and attachments. At Hung Hom, his father, He Yusheng, was onstage accompanying him on the sanxian. (A look back at the performance)
That image and that sound, taken together, go a long way toward explaining what moves me about He Yong: someone so strident, so intense, who still held so much of the past close to his heart.
He began with those feelings and experiences and brought the questions to you. Life had moved on, but what about the things we once had? The familiar ways of living, the feelings between people: where had all of that been put after things changed?
Many articles have already told the story of his life. I do not want to arrange those events in sequence again here, or use what happened to him later to explain every movement he made onstage in those days.
After I heard that he was gone, that feeling of a force disappearing suddenly became very concrete.
My reactions to things are less strong now. The impulse to express myself is less urgent. Words I once felt I had to say can now be left for a while, and then the moment passes. Sometimes the feelings are still there, but I no longer want to follow them further, to work out exactly why I am angry or sad. Still less do I have the energy to express them fully.
Sometimes this change leaves me puzzled.
I have no answer either. But I am certain of what I feel: that fullness, that intensity, that willingness to pursue questions seriously, is becoming harder to find.
Remembering He Yong is also a way of remembering the force we are losing.