Apart from politics and market, ideology was a significant factor in the realm of rock music. Upholding an ideology that focused on individuality and autonomy, and epousing a set of aesthetic value that placed emphases on live performance: how to maintain a balance between autonomy from politics and adaptation to market tastes became a question for both rock artists and the culture industry, a topic of which will be examined in the dissertation. / At the same time, this paper examined the struggle of rock artists against the official constraints and prohibitive coding via rock lyrics, the visual, the music, the body as well as the theatrical performance. / Finally, this paper explores how rock artists and the rock industry turned to alternative spaces for projecting their causes: the Internet, the underground music network and the realm of piracy, spaces where interferences from both the state and the market were minimum. / It also took as its study why rock music was a noise in the market and how rock labels contested for a space in the market which had been plagued by piracy and lack of protection for intellectual property rights. It at the same time explored the ways rock companies attempted to make the books balanced in operating the rock music business in a market where rock fans only constituted a marginal audience. / It looked at how the government imposed control and prohibition on the publishing, performance and dissemination of rock music which it perceived as an alien noise. For this, interviews had been held with personnel from the official apparatuses, the culture industry, the mass media as well as the rock artists and musicians, in a way to understand why rock was rarely heard on the radio or performed on television; why rock music became a term rarely appeared in the official press; and why rock was not allowed to mingle with official discourse like party songs or national anthem; and in what ways the contents of songs as well as the visuals on album covers were censored; and how the government controlled the speech, acts and dress of rock artists on stage. / This paper concludes with the view that despite the many constraints encountered by rock music in the realm of both the state and the market, rock music as a cultural space did not totally lose its freedom, autonomy or integrity. It adopted a mode of communication which is hinged on the non-verbal, the second-order signification, the hidden and the symbolic. It utilised a strategy which avoids direct antagonism with the political regime, and sought outlets for its own messages and meanings. / This paper started by examining how rock music had been transformed into a genre distinguished with its ideology and aesthetics in a socialist country where politics and economy weighed equally significant. / This study took rock music as a cultural space that reflected a larger political and economic environment in China, where it had been marginalized and segregated as a noise by both the state and the market. / Wong Yan Chau Christina. / "September 2006." / Adviser: Joseph Man Chan. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-03, Section: A, page: 0783. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.