Campus Folk

Campus folk, Mandarin xiaoyuan minge, is the singer-songwriter movement that began on university campuses in Taiwan in the 1970s and flowered in mainland China in the 1990s. Armed with acoustic guitars and literary Mandarin lyrics, students such as *Yang Hsien* and *Lo Ta-yu* first set modern Chinese poetry to song as an assertion of cultural identity, and a generation later mainland songwriters around *Gao Xiaosong* and the singer *Lao Lang* turned the idiom toward nostalgia for school days, first love and youth itself. Its compilations, above all "Campus Ballads" (1994), made it the defining soundtrack of Chinese student life.