Deng Lijun

(a.k.a. Teresa Teng)

b. 29 January 1953, Yunlin County,

Taiwan; d. 8 May 1995, Thailand

Pop singer

Deng was the most successful Chinese female singers. Her songs are popular in Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, the overseas communities and the PRC (www.teresa-teng.org.tw/). She was born into a military family, learned singing at the age of six in an army entertainment unit and won first prizes at song contests in 1964 and 1965. Four years later she began recording songs and acting in TV dramas. She released a very successful Japanese album in March 1974 and gave her first concerts in Hong Kong (1976) and in the USA and Canada (1979). Around that time her sentimental love songs spread via audio tapes to the mainland and started a Deng Lijun craze, reflected in the popular saying, ‘Old Deng [Xiaoping] rules by day and Little Deng [Lijun] rules by night’.

People cherished the sweetness in her voice, which allowed her to sing folksongs, romantic ditties and Western-style pop songs. She basically followed the Shanghai tradition of the 1930s and 1940s and had a tremendous impact on the development of Mandarin pop music. Despite her success in the PRC, she never visited the mainland. Deng remained loyal to the Republic and its army, and was honoured with many awards. She died of an asthma attack.

Further reading

Baranovitch, Nimrod (2003). China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 10–13.

Gold, Thomas B. (1993). ‘Go with your Feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan Popular Culture in Greater China’. China Quarterly 136:907–25.

Gu, Linxiu (1995). ‘Teresa Teng Forever’ (Yongyuande Deng Lijun). Sinorama 20.7 (July): 6–19.

ANDREAS STEEN