Wham! Ten Days in China: Who Saw China in 1985?

Wham! in Beijing

I bought a ticket to Wham! Ten Days in China because I wanted to see Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) as it was forty years ago. In 1985, Wham! became the first Western pop group to perform officially in China, giving concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou. I was too young then to remember either Guangzhou, my home city, or Wham!’s visit. A few years later, when I was in primary school, I would often hear, in the early evening on my way home, long passages of saxophone drifting from a window somewhere. It was Careless Whisper, and it became my earliest memory of Wham!. By then the duo had already split up, but the afterglow of their visit to the city lingered.

I later moved to London and gradually found myself farther and farther from Guangzhou. When I saw that this documentary was being released, I went to the cinema without hesitation. Directed by British filmmaker Mike Christie, the film opened in London cinemas last month and will later be broadcast on British television.

The documentary does not rush to take us to the two Chinese cities. Instead, it begins by answering a question: why did Wham! come to China in the first place? Andrew Ridgeley, one half of the duo, narrates the film, taking us back to the Cold War at the very beginning. This was not an ordinary tour, but a carefully conceived commercial strategy. Their manager, Simon Napier-Bell, had come up with a bold idea: make Wham! the first Western pop group to perform officially in China, attract international media attention, particularly from the American press, and use the trip to help the group break into the US market.

At this point, I thought back to 2008, when I was working for a daily newspaper and met Simon when he came to Beijing to promote his memoir, I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch: A fantastic tale of boys, booze and how Wham! were sold to China. The interview was many years ago, and I remember little of what we discussed. But hearing Andrew tell the story at the beginning of the documentary brought something back to me: when Simon talked about the China trip then, he spoke mostly about strategy, publicity and the market.

Wham! Ten Days in China itself has a curious and complicated history. In 1985, to document the trip, Wham!’s management invited British filmmaker Lindsay Anderson to travel with the group. Anderson was not a music-documentary director, but a major figure in the British Free Cinema movement. He had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1969 for If.... His interest had always been in society, people and reality, rather than pop stars. At one point in the film, we hear him say, “Wham! might not be that good...” What really persuaded him to join the trip was China itself, a country that had only recently begun opening its doors to the West.

From the beginning, Anderson was not trying to make the documentary Wham!’s management wanted. After completing If You Were There, Andrew recalled that when he first watched it, he found it “as dull as dishwater”. They had wanted a film about Wham! in China; Anderson had made something closer to a film about China. That version was never released. Wham!’s team later reused the same footage to make Wham! in China: Foreign Skies, a film more heavily focused on the concerts, backstage scenes and the group itself, which was released in 1986 during Wham!’s farewell concert period.

For more than three decades, If You Were There remained officially unreleased, while Foreign Skies gradually became the version people knew. George Michael did not want to revisit the Wham! years repeatedly during his lifetime, and he also opposed the release of If You Were There. It was only after his death that things began to change. In 2024, the British Film Institute screened If You Were There publicly for the first time, with Andrew and the estate of George Michael both supporting its release. Around the same period, director Mike Christie went back to the original footage shot in 1985, added new interviews with Andrew and other Chinese and British participants, and created the documentary we see today. It is not a new edit of If You Were There and Foreign Skies, but a return to the original footage from forty years ago, telling the story of those ten days once again.

For Wham! fans, or those who experienced 1985 themselves, the previously unseen original footage, restored and shown on the big screen for the first time, is precious in itself. The concert scenes from Beijing and Guangzhou are equally valuable. Together with the preparations backstage, rehearsals, press conferences and fragments of the two men travelling around China, they make those ten days forty years ago feel suddenly concrete and present.

But what I was watching for was Guangzhou forty years ago: the hand-painted, poster-like portraits of George and Andrew hanging on the exterior wall of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, with the neat Chinese characters “威猛乐队” — “Wham!” — printed across the poster; the Pearl River flashing past, narrow streets and lanes; and George and Andrew kicking a football with a group of local young men on the lawn outside the Memorial Hall. I found myself constantly trying to work out what the surrounding landscape looked like.

There are plenty of lighter moments in the film. On Beijing’s Wangfujing Street, the two walk into a record shop, much like any band today might go “record shopping” while touring an unfamiliar city. But the film quickly cuts to another side of the trip: Hongqi limousines -symbol of status and political importance, reserved for senior officials and foreign dignitaries, the Great Wall Hotel -one of Beijing’s landmark international hotels, built to accommodate the growing number of foreign visitors as China opened its doors to the outside world, official government banquets and receptions hosted by the British Embassy. A Western pop group coming to China in 1985 was clearly more than a matter of cultural exchange.

Wham! in Beijing

Surrounded by crowds in department stores and by the media, the two look somewhat awkward, but remain unfailingly polite. Before the banquets, they repeatedly lower their heads to read over their prepared speeches; when the time comes to speak, they conduct themselves with considerable poise. In Guangzhou, a traditional Chinese massage therapist gives George Michael a massage. He is covered only by a thin sheet, occasionally lifting his head to look around, his expression full of curiosity, smiling as he says, “It’s very relaxing.”

Throughout the film, the Chinese side is deeply formal about the visit. Whether in the official reception, the banquets or the traditional massage, everything reflects the way China welcomed guests in those days. George and Andrew, meanwhile, are two young men in their early twenties, and at times they seem a little out of their depth.

After the Guangzhou concert on the final night of the trip, George Michael tells the camera that although much of the journey had been difficult, he feels privileged to have performed for “those people”, helping to open their ears and eyes. For him, “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything”.

At this point, I felt a lump in my throat. “Those people” made even the English friend sitting beside me frown. There is no denying that the reappearance of the Beijing Workers’ Gymnasium and Guangzhou Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall concerts is visually striking: the direct collision between the stage and the audience remains astonishing to watch. The memories of musicians Wang Di, Cheng Fangyuan, Cui Jian, DJ Paul and others also offer a genuine record of the impact Wham!’s arrival had on young people at the time. Some recalled that before then they had barely known what a live pop concert could be like; others described how, after the concert, it felt as if the whole world had changed.

I have no doubt those feelings were genuine. Wham!’s arrival did have symbolic significance at the time, and it genuinely influenced a generation of young people — inspiring Cui Jian to make his own rock music, for example, and prompting Paul to become what he describes as “China’s first Western pop music radio DJ”. There is nothing wrong with the documentary focusing on George and Andrew’s experience of travelling through China; after all, this is a documentary about Wham!. But if we return to the commercial strategy outlined at the beginning, China was from the outset part of that strategy: a backdrop for generating publicity and helping Wham! break into the American market. Forty years later, in the retelling of the trip, that instrumental view does not seem to have disappeared entirely.

These precious images are ultimately folded into a one-way narrative of “giving”: music comes from one side, transformation happens on the other, and the people receiving it are left mainly as recipients of change. When the documentary finally frames those ten days around the idea that Wham! came to China to “open the ears and eyes” of a generation of young people, it falls back on a familiar narrative of civilisational enlightenment: China becomes the side waiting to be enlightened, while Wham! is cast as the enlightener.

The feeling is not unfamiliar to me. Ten years ago, I interviewed conductor Daniel Barenboim in London, and that same evening went to hear him speak at a memorial lecture for Edward Said. He recalled conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Ghana, saying that the local audience of course did not understand the symphony, but that they could nevertheless feel a great humanistic statement simply by being there. During the lecture, he also called for the finest European orchestras to perform more often in places that “do not have music”.

I remember my heart sinking at the time. Said spent his life criticising the Orientalist narrative in which the West cast itself as the bringer of enlightenment. He and Barenboim had co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and co-authored Parallels and Paradoxes. Against that background, hearing Barenboim, sitting on that stage, offer his own version of “bringing music there” was all the more striking. Sitting in the cinema years later, I suddenly saw the connection: a pop singer in his early twenties and a world-renowned conductor were, in very different contexts, drawing on a remarkably similar narrative.

China in 1985 was not a blank page waiting to be written on. Before Wham! arrived, there was already a Chinese popular music scene, a youth culture of its own, and a long musical tradition. Young people in post-reform China certainly wanted to know more about the world, but that desire should not be confused with ignorance.

That is perhaps why I can better understand Lindsay Anderson’s decision about where to point his camera. Wham!’s team wanted a travelogue about Wham!; Anderson repeatedly turned his camera towards the streets and ordinary people instead. It reflected a more open-minded way of looking at China. He could not, of course, escape the exoticising gaze of a Western filmmaker looking at China in that era. But at least he had the curiosity to explore, and the willingness to look beyond Wham! and engage with the country around him. There was, at the very least, a curiosity about what else was there to see.