A romance with Bowie’s gleam
Far from the glossy brilliance of her 1983 rebirth, China Girl started life. First penned in Berlin in 1977 during Bowie’s collaboration with Iggy Pop, when both were undercover from excess and expectation. Appeared on Iggy’s The Idiot, the first version was sparse, tense, trembling with paranoia. Co-wrote it, produced it, and then carried it with him like a sketch that would later evolve into anything more daring, more loud, and more seductive.
China Girl returned changed on Let’s Dance. Hired by Bowie to shape a record for large spaces and brighter lights, Nile Rodgers enfolded the song in horns, radio-perfect shine, and rhythm guitar. The original tension persisted, but it was now presented gracefully. Bowie’s voice rose strong, disciplined but yearning. The words still pointed at obsession and cultural dissonance, but the sound drew you in, certain and magnetic.
China Girl’s success in this second form spoke volumes about Bowie’s position in 1983. No longer the alien observer, he had entered pop culture’s core. The track gained both notoriety and controversy for its symbolism and sensuality in a striking video starring New Zealand-Chinese actress Geeling Ng that charted all around. According to Bowie, the song criticised Western fetishism. He understood that dressing up pain in beauty would draw people in more attentively.
It was a ‘very simple, very direct’ statement against bigotry.
(David Bowie, Rolling Stone, 1983)
The track’s composition strikes a perfect balance between crisp and fluid. Although Rodgers’ fingerprints cover the arrangement, Bowie lets the words do the uncertainty. The way the guitar flexes under the line “visions of swastikas in my head” creates a theatrical tension, therefore reminding the listener that this is not merely a love song. It is a song on authority, point of view, and what gets lost in translation. The danceable surface has layers that slowly come into view.
China Girl is one of Bowie’s most complex works from a time when he was trying to mix intimacy with scale. It reveals his proclivity for reinventing his emotional tone, not only in appearance or sound. Though exact, elegant, and profoundly human, the track yet vibrates with the odd conflict between want and peril. Though he never explained everything, Bowie left enough room in the sparkles for shadows to linger with China Girl.
