Shanghai expected a surprise from the Icelandic singer Björk on her debut in China and she did not disappoint. But her first concert is set to be her last.

The Chinese Ministry of Culture has said that it will impose stricter rules on foreign artists wanting to come to China after Björk ended her performance this week with a cry for Tibetan independence.

She concluded a passionate performance of her song Declare Independence with a shout of “Tibet, Tibet” — an outburst intended to draw public attention to Chinese rule over the Buddhist Himalayan region. The Dalai Lama, revered by Tibetans as a God-king, fled during an uprising in 1959 in which tens of thousands of Tibetans were killed.

The Culture Ministry said that the action by Björk had hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and would be handled according to the law. “We will further tighten controls on foreign artists performing in China to prevent similar cases from happening in the future. We shall never tolerate any attempt to separate Tibet from China and will no longer welcome any artists who deliberately do this,” it said in a statement on its website.

The singer has performed the song to support other movements in the past and dedicated it to Kosovo at a concert in Japan last month.

Her performance last Sunday, which was not reported for several days in the state-controlled media, has set off a flurry of angry comments in Chinese cyberspace. “I don’t understand. Why do Western stars give a s*** about Tibet? Isn’t Tibet ours?” one comment said.

Another wrote: “I like Björk. It’s OK for her to have a different point of view, but for her to do this is disrespectful to fans here, very selfish of her.”

The glitzy metropolis cannot have been wholly astonished. The city’s English-language newspaper, the Shanghai Daily, heralded her concert last month with the headline “Björk’s Shanghai Surprise”. She also performed at a Free Tibet concert in San Francisco in 1996.

The singer issued a statement defending her action and said that she was not a politician but a musician whose duty was to express human emotions.

Local music promoters are now anxious that visits by other singers could be in jeopardy, especially in a year when China knows that it is the subject of worldwide scrutiny while it plays host to the Olympics in Beijing.

Jason Magnus, the British founder of the Beijing Pop Festival, said that the action by Björk would almost certainly make it more difficult for other artists to perform. He said: “The Olympic year magnifies all the issues with the Chinese vis-à-vis the rest of the world. It can only have a negative impact.”

Chinese nervousness was highlighted when Zhang Qingli, the Communist Party boss of Tibet, accused the Dalai Lama yesterday of seeking to sabotage the Games. He said: “The Beijing Olympics is the focus of world attention and the people are exalted, but even a grand gathering like this, he is engaging in sabotage and threatening to cause trouble.”

The next performers due in China have been approved already and most are unlikely to want to try to make waves, preferring to focus on entertaining audiences deprived for decades of watching premier musicians.

When the Rolling Stones played in Shanghai two years ago they were asked to exclude four songs from their set. Mick Jagger said that this was not a difficulty for a band that had been waiting to play in China for 30 years and had 400 songs from which to choose.

Sounding off

— Bob Dylan walked a different road from Bob Geldof at the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 when he made a plea during his live set for some of the cash raised from the concerts to be diverted to struggling American farmers. Geldof later declared the protest “crass”

— Philadelphia audiences expecting Rage Against the Machine’s rock/rap were shocked in 1993 when the band strode on stage nude, except for tape over their mouths, and remained there, in silence, for 15 minutes to protest against music censorship

— R.E.M. helped to celebrate the 60th birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s pro-democracy leader, by dedicating songs to her during an Irish concert, beamed directly into Burma, against its ruling general’s wishes, by the Democratic Voice of Burma radio station

— Sinéad O’Connor provoked several thousand complaints while performing on Saturday Night Live in 1992. She decided to protest against child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church by ripping up and stamping on a photograph of Pope John Paul II, who had been shot the year before, while shouting: “Fight the real enemy!

Sources: Rolling Stone; dassk.com; Times archives

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