This book is a valuable contribution to the fields of popular music studies and cultural studies in China. It presents a hybridized and mosaic-like musical landscape from a locality that accommodates both national and transnational migrations. Leveraging the historical depths of Chinese music and culture, Kielman constructs multi-dimensional micro-narratives of several individual musicians’ biographies, their connections to their music, their identities and their approaches to communication with the audiences.

Chapter one takes an introductory role, clarifying the book's main concepts, “musical cosmopolitanism” and the Chinese word tianxia. Kielman adopts the term “musical cosmopolitanism” to refer to a range of musical practices explored by ethnomusicologists since the 1990s “who had looked to music as a metaphor for broader cultural processes of globalization” (p. 6). In this view, musical cosmopolitanism is an active process of mobility through which travelling musicians employ their own agency to form new understandings about where and when they are: “a locally situated and historically constituted cosmopolitan formation” (p. 171, n. 3). In the context of contemporary China, music offers sound agency that impacts “the processes of producing, embracing, reworking, and resisting” people's experiences of cosmopolitanism (p. 7). Kielman builds on this understanding of musical cosmopolitanism, describing it as multiple, discrepant and vernacular (p. 7). He innovatively connects this term with the Chinese concept tianxia, which he introduces as derived from Confucian thought and describes as “a broad moral and civilizational complex unifying the world” (p. 7). Kielman argues that this tianxia concept influences Chinese people's ways of thinking and engaging with the broader world and thus drives Chinese musicians’ practices in a global context.

In chapters two to seven, the author's focus locks onto musicians from two popular bands Mabang (Caravan, literally “horse gang”) and Wanju Chuanzhang (Toy Captain) located in Guangzhou, China's third-largest city. These two bands are associated with the same record company, Xingwaixing Records, one of China's largest record companies. Such a specific focus, against China's vast geographical coverage and large population, allows the author to provide a thick description of the individual musicians’ inspirations, the process of their music making and circulation, marketing infrastructure, and so on, as well as detailed musical and textual analysis. Chapter two mainly provides ethnographic and musical analyses on the cooperative process behind Mabang's debut album and the Xingwaixing Records’ promotion of it, revealing the interconnection between musical genre, the market, and concepts of the local, national and the global. In chapter three, Kielman explores Wanju Chuanzhang's “Island sound” as a form of cosmopolitan engagement with global island cultures. After examining how musical elements, timbres and stylistic conversion from diverse genres are redeployed as sonic representations of Nan'ao Island (a small island off the southeast cost of China and hometown to some band members), Kielman argues that a creative disjuncture between lyrics and music generates new ways of thinking about the local and its position in the world. While recognizing these musicians all migrated from various localities with distinctive rural or ethnic identities, in chapter four Kielman takes their use of local dialects to provide an intersecting aesthetic and political dimension, believing the musicians were using their local “languages” as a means to communicate their notions about place. In chapters five and six, Kielman further provides the biographical narratives of each musician, looking into how these reflect intersections of personal and national histories, cosmopolitan formations and individual creativities. In chapter seven, the author analyses the modes of musical circulation and the listening practices which contribute to broader transformations of state, society and the space these musicians are embedded in. Finally, in the epilogue, Kielman picks up once again on musical cosmopolitanism, mobilities, and tianxia in the context of a broader intellectual history of conceiving music, place and governance in China.

The book adds a rare but a resonant voice to existing English-language works on popular music in contemporary China by means of providing a focus on a setting other than Beijing or Shanghai, on indie music, and on a model that eschews the hegemony/resistance binary. From my perspective, and even with these strengths, the author would ideally have further considered issues such as gender, ethnicity and social class, since all these factors would also be likely to impact an individual's experience of cosmopolitanism and sense of tianxia. But this criticism aside, the book is a welcome and distinctive contribution to knowledge on Chinese popular music.