Short Biography

Chang Liu is an Associate Fellow at the Heidelberg-based research project Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China. Originally from China, he completed his PhD in Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University in cotutelle with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His English-language publications include a special issue of the journal Cultural History titled Cultural History and Heritage in Chinese Theme Parks, as well as several book chapters on popular music culture, such as “Songs of the World: On the Global Dissemination and Geopolitics of Chinese Rock” and “Coco Lee vs. the U.S. Music Industry: An Asian American Diva’s Journey Across Borders.” He is currently editing a special issue titled Celebrity and Ageing Across East and West, forthcoming in Celebrity Studies in December 2026. His research interests include popular culture, environmental humanities, and energy humanities, among others. Before entering academia, he served as Musical Affairs Officer at the French Embassy in China and continues to occasionally organize concert tours in China for emerging European musicians.

Project

By the end of the 20th century, the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing technology made music freely available online in the format of MP3, which subsequently turned huge number of cassettes and CDs into obsolete. North American record labels treated those unsalable albums as commercial waste, and in collaboration with waste management companies they scrapped those albums and exported them to countries like China as plastic waste for recycling. However, instead of being recycled, these scrapped cassettes and CDs were resold in the gray economy of China’s music market. In this project I will excavate the afterlives of American musical waste in China through the lens of transcultural studies and political ecology and demonstrate the importance of the ecological dimension of the recording industry in the context of globalization. I will argue that American musical waste as one type of transnational garbage, despite its negative connotations in environmental justice discourse, can also be used as a tool by the under privileged Chinese to achieve empowerment. This urges the necessity of bringing multiple perspectives into the study of waste and considers the limit of global environmental justice discourse which frequently runs the risk of denying agency to the underprivileged groups and forging new stereotypes.