On this rock i stand

Over 15 years, Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau has watched the music scene in Beijing grow

There are probably few people who know as much about Beijing's music scene as Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau. In fact, as a student of Chinese at Leiden University in his hometown in the Netherlands, his master of arts thesis was about an underground rock band from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region called Tongue. As a follow-up, for his doctoral dissertation, he looked at mainstream Chinese musicians such as Faye Wong and Second Hand Rose.

At the end of the 1990s Groenewegen-Lau, now 35, played drums in a band at college, which soon broke up, but he continued drumming as a hobby.