Breaking Out of Revolution Bay
Prologue
My memories of my father’s secondhand Land Rover SUV are always mixed with the old songs on its USB drive. For a Gen Z child, it was almost a nineties sampler: Lo Ta-yu’s Zhi Hu Zhe Ye, Cui Jian’s Balls Under the Red Flag and Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March, and, of course, Childhood.
Some lyrics I understood. Others I didn’t. Dad explained the ones I didn’t.
He said Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March was a bewildered questioning of oneself at a time of Soviet collapse and widespread predictions that China would collapse too. He said the “red cloth” in A Piece of Red Cloth wasn’t love, but “leftist” thought obscuring one’s vision.
But two songs were exceptions: “Queen’s Road East” and “Speeding Car.”
What puzzled me was that whenever those melodies began, Dad’s voice would grow a little quieter, as if avoiding something.
He only said vaguely, “**Hong Kong people were very confused back then.**”
Speeding car, speeding car on the highway,
Chasing, overtaking, heedless of the lights.
Speeding car, speeding car, the speed of thought,
Almost there, not there—the engine rages too.
I remember that night clearly. We were driving along Jingshi Road in Jinan, past interchanges like ribbons dancing outside the window.
Lights flashed across rows of towers in the busy CBD, sweeping rapidly behind us.
I really seemed to feel that I was in a speeding car.
I didn’t understand. Too much information was rushing at me. It was like fragments of unencodable signifiers flashing across the cerebral cortex during schizophrenia.
I reached to catch them and caught nothing.
Those lyrics, and my father’s evasiveness, planted a long prologue inside me.
They were the real reason I later turned on the computer secretly at night and searched Wikipedia for political entries that weren’t supposed to be mentioned.
I could roughly understand the metaphors above. But one rapid, intensely kinetic spoken passage in Speeding Car baffled me for a long time.
It was as if the car had switched on its navigation system, announcing at an unquestionable speed:
Chai Wan, North Point, Causeway Bay,
Wan Chai, Central, Admiralty, Tsim Sha Tsui,
Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok, Prince Edward, Kowloon Tong,
Sha Tin, Sheung Shui, Lo Wu, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen,
Taipei, Fuzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Central.
Some names I knew, like Central and Lo Wu from the news. Others meant nothing to me.
Yet their peculiar arrangement formed my earliest understanding of Hong Kong, and even of that era.
My questions about the “speeding car” never faded with time.
Then, recently, strange videos kept appearing in my Bilibili feed.
Most consisted of a few still or moving frames: Lo Ta-yu in sunglasses, a Hong Kong coin bearing Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, and some inscrutable green-screen footage, set to the drums of “Queen’s Road East.”
Rows of “protect this” and “it’s blowing up” drifted across the screen.
The comments were lively too:
Maybe the uploader should change the title, though.
This moderator looks kind and friendly.
…
By then, I understood far more than I had in the Land Rover.
I knew what “queen” and “comrade” referred to, and the history behind “warm and cold weather alike affect this city.”
I knew a new generation of internet users was playing an unspoken game of wits with Bilibili’s moderation: cat and mouse on the internet highway, for amusement.
After all, young people like answering emptiness with deconstruction and provocations against authority.
It’s common enough. Mice like dancing in the gaps beneath a hydraulic press.
But it brought back my childhood memories. The metaphors in “Queen’s Road East” were so direct that they had become memes.
I still hadn’t understood “Speeding Car.”
The internet wasn’t much help. Commenters explained metaphors with more metaphors. Censorship naturally ruled out a Baidu Baike entry. Searching felt like looking for a needle in the sea.
But 2022 was probably no ordinary year.
Alongside the unspeakable “people surging like a tide” and the lifting of pandemic restrictions, there was ChatGPT’s sudden arrival.
The internet’s information flow had hit the accelerator, faster even than “the times are running too fast.”
With AI, I opened a chat window and finally began catching up.
I wanted to understand what kind of racing thought that car, forever “almost there, not there” on the highway, represented. What kind of suppressed anger its engine carried.
I | The Route
To understand a political song’s metaphors, we first need to understand their subject.
Lo Ta-yu likes using different lyrics for the same melody to create different metaphors. “Speeding Car” has a twin, “Train,” which evokes Taiwan from Japanese rule through the 1990s.
First, the lyrics:
Speeding car, speeding car on the highway,
Chasing, overtaking, heedless of the lights.
Speeding car, speeding car, the speed of thought,
Almost there, not there—the engine rages too.
Police car, police car, pursuing and arresting,
Thousand-ton trucks go straight to customs.
Train, train, the tracks of consensus,
Each goes their own way, each begins a journey.
Bicycle, bicycle, tenderness in a foreign place,
Tank, armored tank, history’s absurdity.
Stolen car, stolen car, flowing east with the river,
Go, go, go, go—there is no turning back.
Sports car, sports car, the thrill of sensation,
How could we endure deer carts and horse carts?
Sedan, sedan, the bearing of property,
Advance and retreat with the times and climate.
Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, distinguish the lines.
When and where will we need no brakes, breaking through Victory Pass?
Red, green, a hundred changing signals; the old rough road is too slow.
Engage, disengage, push and pull—afraid only there is no time.
Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, beware the lines.
When and where will there be no tickets, speeding through the great checkpoint?
Red, green, a hundred changing signals; revising the road is too slow.
The times, the times run too fast; we cannot catch up with time.
Speeding car, speeding car on the highway,
Chasing, overtaking, heedless of the lights.
Speeding car, speeding car, the speed of thought,
Almost there, not there—the engine rages too.
Police car, police car, pursuing and arresting,
Thousand-ton trucks go straight to customs.
Train, train, the tracks of consensus,
Each goes their own way, each begins a journey.
Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, distinguish the lines.
When and where will we need no brakes, breaking out of Revolution Bay?
Red, green, a hundred changing signals; the old rough road is too slow.
Engage, disengage, push and pull—afraid only there is no time.
Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, beware the lines.
When and where will there be no tickets, speeding through the great checkpoint?
Red, green, a hundred changing signals; revising the road is too slow.
The times, the times run too fast; we cannot catch up with time.
Chai Wan, North Point, Causeway Bay,
Wan Chai, Central, Admiralty, Tsim Sha Tsui,
Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok, Prince Edward, Kowloon Tong,
Sha Tin, Sheung Shui, Lo Wu, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen,
Taipei, Fuzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Central.
Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, distinguish the lines.
When and where will we need no brakes, breaking out of Diamond Hill?
Red, green, a hundred changing signals; the old rough road is too slow.
Engage, disengage, push and pull—afraid only there is no time.
Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, beware the lines.
When and where will there be no tickets, speeding through the great checkpoint?
Red, green, a hundred changing signals; revising the road is too slow.
The times, the times run too fast; we cannot catch up with time.
A speeding car versus a train. Both race along their routes, but the car can move “left and right.”
Already we can glimpse the car’s metaphor.
On the evening of April 30, 1976, Hua Guofeng stayed to report recent work to Mao. When Hua said the overall situation was excellent, though several provinces were doing less well, Mao immediately wrote three remarks:
“**Take it slowly. Don’t rush.”
“Follow the previous policy.”
“With you in charge, I’m at ease. If there are problems, consult Jiang Qing.**”
Later, the phrase appeared in two versions: “previous policy” and “established policy.”
All this talk of policy has something of the train about it: one track, one permitted route, like Taiwan before martial law was lifted.
But what was China at the time of the song’s release? A speeding car, swerving left and right.
Consider the opening:
Speeding car, speeding car on the highway,
Chasing, overtaking, heedless of the lights.
It captures the central image of early reform and opening: a car racing wildly down a highway.
The highway is conceptual as well as physical: the “circle” Deng drew, the special economic zones; the wild experiment of crossing the river by feeling for stones; a complete break with the rigid railway of the Mao era.
“Heedless of the lights” captures an age in which efficiency overrode everything. It wasn’t just ignoring the planned economy’s old rules, but a deliberate, excited, almost provocative contempt for red lights.
This was the rise of the “ten-thousand-yuan household,” and Shenzhen’s spirit of “time is money, efficiency is life.”
The car’s speed was the defining feature of the eighties: a raw economic impulse freed from restraint.
II | Change
Stop there and we have a textbook account. Textbooks tell you about the economy accelerating after reform. They don’t tell you this:
Speeding car, speeding car, the speed of thought,
Almost there, not there—the engine rages too.
The metaphor has the frightening feel of something one mustn’t say.
The car is not just the economy, but the speed of thought. The eighties were a brief period of intellectual vitality in China. The enthusiasm for speaking out, big-character posters, and great debates had not entirely faded after the Cultural Revolution. From River Elegy’s longing for “blue civilization” to scar literature’s reflections on the Cultural Revolution, the pace of intellectual liberation was even faster and more dizzying than economic growth.
But it was almost there, not there. The destination was a thorough modernizing transformation. The car could not arrive because its cabin was full of conflict.
Reformers wanted to floor the accelerator, with political reform keeping pace. The birdcage-economy faction kept wanting to touch the brakes. Elders such as Deng and Ye held the final authority to interpret “policy”: they enjoyed the speed and feared losing control.
The car shook violently at the threshold of arrival. Hence the crucial line:
The engine rages too.
What is the engine? The car’s actual source of power: 1.1 billion Chinese people.
Why is it angry? The car is racing ahead, but its benefits are distributed profoundly unequally.
Dual-track pricing became a breeding ground for corruption. Official profiteers used power to obtain goods at low planned prices, then resold them at high market prices.
What was this? Legalized robbery. The engine suffered the overheating of rampant inflation while watching the drivers sell off its fuel.
That anger first surfaced in the student protests of 1986, then gathered a few years later into the people surging like a tide.
III | Order
Police car, police car, pursuing and arresting.
A speeding car ignores the lights; naturally, a police car gives chase.
The police car represents the system’s forces of stability maintenance, its pursuit and arrest operating on several levels.
First, literally: local order broke down in the eighties, and public safety was once extremely poor.
The 1980 Beijing Railway Station bombing killed one person at the scene and injured eighty-nine. The June 16, 1983 Yakeshi/Hongqigou massacre left sixteen dead. The Zhu Guohua case, involving someone as powerful as Zhu De’s grandson, shocked the world. Bandits on trains and roads; gangs that chopped off hands.
The Strike Hard campaign was therefore the police car made concrete, an iron fist brought down on social disorder.
Second, intellectually: the police car is the ideological censor, the machinery of dictatorship. Its ultimate task is to pursue and arrest any speed of thought that crosses a boundary.
It is a reminder: this highway has an owner, and the car’s freedom has limits.
Thousand-ton trucks go straight to customs.
The thousand-ton truck travels alongside the speeding car. Unlike the car’s lightness, agitation, and thought, the truck is ponderous, enormous, an expression of state will. It takes not the highway but the direct road to customs.
This is China’s export-oriented economy, the national strategy of trading shirts for airplanes.
The truck has only tasks and quotas. It represents the collective force of China Inc., driven by the state machine toward a clear goal: earning foreign exchange.
Alongside the speeding car’s wild, individual-entrepreneur capitalism, it formed the two parallel economic routes of eighties China.
IV | Myth
Train, train, the tracks of consensus.
Beyond the speeding car and truck, there is the train, the era’s most common long-distance transport—and a metaphor for the old order.
A train must stay on tracks. Those tracks are consensus.
What consensus? The Four Cardinal Principles, socialism’s claim to legitimacy.
As I understand it, the locomotive is Mao’s icon, rendered “harmless.” His portrait still hangs above the gate. Nominally, he remains the consensus nobody may deny.
The lyric brilliantly captures the cognitive dissonance of the eighties: a capitalist car wildly overtakes on the neighboring highway while everyone officially remains aboard the socialist train.
Each goes their own way, each begins a journey.
This immediately punctures that consensus. Yes, everyone is on the same train, but each is on a separate journey.
The passengers—conservatives, reformers, birdcage advocates, liberals—all have their own hidden intentions.
They share a train called socialism with Chinese characteristics, but carry entirely different maps and hope to disembark at different stations.
Conservatives will never get off. Even if it derails, they will sway their bodies to pretend it is moving. Reformers want Market Station. Liberals want to go straight to Democracy Station.
Under the cloak of consensus lay immense ideological division and factional conflict.
V | The People
Bicycle, bicycle, tenderness in a foreign place.
From the grand narratives of cars, trucks, and trains, the camera abruptly closes in on a bicycle.
This is the fuel at the very bottom of the speeding car: the armies of bicycles emblematic of China in the eighties and nineties.
The bicycle is the migrant worker far from home, riding into the foreign worlds of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.
Tenderness is an extraordinarily apt word. This is not the angry engine, but the quietest, most compliant, most easily crushed force in the upheaval.
They load and unload the thousand-ton truck. They are the paving stones of the highway.
What they seek in these foreign places is not the speed of thought, but merely a tender, humble space in which to survive.
Tank, armored tank, history’s absurdity.
This is the song’s most terrifying line. Lo Ta-yu scarcely uses metaphor; he throws the word directly at the listener. The tank is the final response to the engine’s anger.
It is the police car’s highest form.
It is no figure of speech, but the most concrete image of that summer in 1989.
History’s absurdity: a journey pursuing the speed of thought crashes into the hardest, most brutal wall.
I would add that this absurdity was global in 1989. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to upheaval in Eastern Europe, and later the Soviet August coup, armored vehicles played roles at historical turning points around the world.
In China, it became the people surging like a tide.
VI | The Tide
Stolen car, stolen car, flowing east with the river.
After the tanks, the car’s idealistic driver, Zhao, was forced out.
The car became stolen.
Who stole it? The hardliners who ended the anger with tanks. They stole the right to speak for reform.
Flowing east with the river is both the classical lament of the Yangtze flowing away—history’s tide gone, irreversible—and, in 1991, a daring, almost explicit political pun: Jiang, whose surname means river.
The river flows east, bestowing its grace upon the people.
The stolen car was flowing unstoppably into Jiang’s era.
Go, go, go, go—there is no turning back.
Lo Ta-yu spits out four consecutive “go”s with something like contempt.
It is absolute rejection, disgust, and farewell. What is going is the idealism of the entire eighties.
The speeding car full of thought is dead.
What follows is an irreversible turn right—not political liberalization, but an utterly naked economic devotion to money.
The tank did not stop the car. It killed its idealists and handed the wheel to car thieves who cared only about money.
No turning back echoes Deng’s declaration that an arrow released cannot return to the bow. Here it is a bleak irony: we can return neither to horse carts nor to the car’s idealistic age.
VII | Reality
Sports car, sports car, the thrill of sensation.
The speeding car of thought is dead. The sports car of money arrives.
What is it? The very bourgeois liberalization the tanks were supposedly suppressing.
Here is the greatest paradox: tanks crushed liberalization’s ideas—democracy—while clearing the way for its lifestyle—consumerism.
The sports car is those who got rich first in the nineties: thrills, karaoke clubs, the stock market, property speculation.
The idealist’s anger at never arriving is replaced and submerged by the excitement of plunging into business.
How could we endure deer carts and horse carts?
The ingenuity lies in deer carts.
On the surface, deer carts and horse carts represent the slow old system of the train era. Having tasted the thrill of speeding cars and sports cars, how could people endure returning?
But deer and horse together invoke the idiom calling a deer a horse, forcing an obvious falsehood upon others.
It is a sharp satire of official propaganda. Deng calls the capitalist deer cart a socialist horse cart with Chinese characteristics.
Lo asks: with tanks and sports cars so nakedly visible, how can we endure this absurd insistence that a deer is a horse?
Sedan, sedan, the bearing of property,
Advance and retreat with the times and climate.
The speeding car is idealism; the sports car, pleasure; the sedan, status. Here the Cantonese term fong ce means a passenger car.
It is the emerging technocrats and privileged middle class of the nineties. They are not the reckless drivers of the eighties who ignored the lights. They wear suits and sit in air-conditioned cars, rather than riding bicycles, displaying the bearing of property.
They are the stolen-car era’s beneficiaries, official-businessmen, the final victors of this absurd history.
A genuine privileged ruling class, born under socialism’s legitimacy.
VIII | History
Forward, backward, circling round;
Left, right, distinguish the lines.
This precisely captures the sedan class’s philosophy of survival. Neither idealistic like the speeding car nor reckless like the sports car, they are pure opportunists. Their sole creed is to watch the times and climate.
When the political climate encourages enrichment, they advance and accumulate wealth. When it cools through anti-corruption or rectification campaigns, they retreat and protect themselves.
After the engine’s anger is quieted and the bicycles are treated “tenderly,” this is the car thieves’ new order: an age of sedans ruled by cynics and opportunists, all watching the climate.
When and where will we need no brakes,
Breaking through Victory Pass?
The speeding car’s ultimate cry: when can we stop braking? Breaking through Victory Pass is the plain desire to overcome obstacles and reach the perpetually deferred destination of democratization and modernization.
In Revolution Bay, bay sounds like bend: a detour. It reflects fear of, and reflection upon, the Cultural Revolution’s “ten-year detour.”
The eighties car wanted to escape that revolutionary bend. Breaking out would mean the speed of thought finally overcoming old leftist restraints: liberalization’s complete victory.
Red, green, a hundred changing signals;
The old rough road is too slow.
Changing red and green lights are the political signals flickering before the car, attempting to discipline it, now left, now right. They are also the seductive, decadent nightlife of the early nineties.
Their constant changes replace the eighties’ comparatively clear intellectual direction and confuse the driver.
The rough old road is literal: eighties infrastructure could not carry the economy’s speed. It is also spiritual: the road carrying thought can no longer match the revolutions of the people’s angry engine.
The car must revise the road—take the revisionist path.
Engage, disengage, push and pull—
Afraid only there is no time.
This gives motion to all the circling backward and forward. Engagement and disengagement refer to the clutch, connecting and disconnecting the car’s power.
Push and pull is the leadership’s tug-of-war between reformers and conservatives: pushing through decentralization, pulling back through recentralization.
The car advances in fits and starts.
Behind it lies the age’s central anxiety: there is no time.
It is China’s collective fear of falling behind. After witnessing Japan and the Four Asian Tigers take off, China felt a powerful urgency: time waits for no one.
If we don’t move now, we’ll be left behind.
This fear ultimately drives the car through the lights regardless.
Forward, backward, circling round;
Left, right, beware the lines.
An exquisite sketch of China’s political ecology. Forward and backward is reform’s one step forward, two steps back, the hesitation of almost arriving.
Distinguishing—or watching—the boundaries of left and right expresses political fear etched into Chinese bones.
It is more than the eighties’ struggles over opposing liberalization and promoting reform. It is a survival instinct shaped by campaigns of exposure, criticism, and investigation, and purging the “three kinds of people.”
Every person must draw distinctions and take sides.
The trauma produced an entire generation of sedan passengers skilled at watching the climate.
The speeding car that refuses these boundaries and tries to escape heedless of the lights is destined for a fatal crash on a land so clearly divided into left and right.
When and where will there be no tickets,
Speeding through the great checkpoint?
A fiercer, more grassroots desire than Victory Pass.
Tickets means fines. To need none is to long for complete freedom, without rules or punishment. The great checkpoint is, first, the physical Lo Wu border crossing.
In Cantonese, speeding through it evokes smugglers racing the border—one of the liveliest images of the gray economy in the late eighties and early nineties.
Metaphorically, it means breaking the ultimate boundary between socialism and capitalism.
The car wants to evade the police, break through the system’s restraints, and arrive in a wholly free space outside the law.
Red, green, a hundred changing signals;
Revising the road is too slow.
The times, the times run too fast;
We cannot catch up with time.
This sums up the song. The times seem too fast, but the heart of it is failing to catch up.
A paradoxical anxiety: we are already moving so quickly, so why are we still late? The time we chase is socialist modernization, the Four Tigers’ level of development, the destination of Victory Pass.
The lyric captures the central contradiction of China’s transition. Internally, the age changes at the car’s astonishing speed. Externally, on the world’s coordinate system, it remains behind.
That double anxiety explains the angry engine and the inability to turn back.
IX | The Map
The place names in the spoken passage:
Chai Wan, North Point, Causeway Bay,
Wan Chai, Central, Admiralty, Tsim Sha Tsui,
Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok, Prince Edward, Kowloon Tong,
Sha Tin, Sheung Shui, Lo Wu, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen,
Taipei, Fuzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Central.
This rapid passage was the part I understood least in the car. Like navigation, yet apparently illogical.
Now I understand it as the car’s map of thought.
It starts in Hong Kong, Chai Wan to Kowloon Tong: a complete MTR route map, representing a mature capitalist city.
Then come Sha Tin, Sheung Shui, and Lo Wu: Hong Kong’s boundary, the great checkpoint.
In an instant, the car crosses into Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Xiamen: China’s special economic zones, the highway’s starting point.
The map jumps suddenly to Taipei, the endpoint of Train, another “China.”
Then north along mainland China’s coast and economic arteries: Fuzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing. The car’s thought races ahead, reconstructing China’s map in seconds along economic axes such as Shenzhen and Shanghai and the political axis of Beijing.
After Beijing, the destination jumps strangely back to Central.
Central is Hong Kong’s heart, the ultimate symbol of capital.
After touring China and even “unifying” Taipei, the car that left Hong Kong still ends in Central.
The journey is therefore not a revolution, but a pilgrimage whose final home is capital. The car must eventually drive back to Central.
Perhaps this was the deepest helplessness behind my father’s evasiveness.
Years later, I really went to Hong Kong.
I walked across the Shenzhen River and passed that great checkpoint at Lo Wu. Aboard the MTR East Rail line, I watched the view and traveled a little section of the lyrics in reverse:
Lo Wu, Sheung Shui, Sha Tin…
The station-name walls in MTR’s distinctive Song typeface, once existing only in lyrics for me, accumulated one by one in my phone’s photo album.
At last I stood on Queen’s Road Central, inside Central itself. I looked up at towers thrusting into the sky like blades, hearing the ticking of traffic signals planted on some of the world’s most expensive land.
X |
Once we raced down the highway, running red lights without looking back, stamping on the accelerator, trying to cover two hundred years of road in ten.
Are those ardent thoughts, angry engines, and feet that refused to brake still here?
Do we still debate Sartre and Nietzsche late at night? Still believe that breaking through Victory Pass means something real? Or have endless circles forward and backward taught us only to watch the climate, put away our ideals among a hundred changing signals, and ask merely for a safe seat in a sedan?
The cities grow brighter. The highways grow wider. Yet we seem less and less able to see the road in the night outside.
Who is driving? Who is being left behind?
Can we still be angry for an unspeakable destination? Or have we accepted that all of it is someone else’s speed, someone else’s navigation, someone else’s Victory Pass?
The car is still moving. But are we passengers or spectators? Those who flee, or those who remain?
As the anger and idealism of almost arriving dissolve into glittering nights and bridges, as everything becomes history’s absurdity, we are left asking:
Are we really still in the car?