"China Girl" is a song written by Iggy Pop and David Bowie during their years in Berlin, first appearing on Pop's debut solo album The Idiot. The song became more widely known when it was re-recorded by Bowie, who released it as the second single from his most commercially successful album, Let's Dance. The UK single release of Bowie's version reached No. 2 for one week on 14 June 1983, while the US release reached No. 10.
Original recording
, the author of the David Bowie biography, Starman, explains the song was inspired by Iggy Pop's infatuation with Kuelan Nguyen, a Vietnamese woman, as a metaphor for his Stooges career. Production-wise the original recording that appeared on The Idiot is raw and unpolished compared to Bowie's hit remake in 1983. Nile Rodgers, the producer of David Bowie's 1983 version of the song, offered his own interpretation of the lyrics: "I figured China Girl was about doing drugs... because China is China White which is heroin, girl is cocaine. I thought it was a song about speedballing. I thought, in the drug community in New York, coke is girl, and heroin is boy. So then I proceeded to do this arrangement which was ultra pop. Because I thought that, being David Bowie, he would appreciate the irony of doing something so pop about something so taboo. And what was really cool was that he said 'I love that!'."
Track listing
"China Girl" – 3:26
"Baby" – 3:24
Bowie cover
Music video
The music video, featuring New Zealand model Geeling Ng, was directed by David Mallet and shot mainly in the Chinatown district of Sydney, Australia. Along with his previous single's video for "Let's Dance" with the critique of racism in Australia, Bowie described the video as a "very simple, very direct" statement against racism. The video consciously parodies Asian female stereotypes. It depicted as a hypermasculine protagonist in an interracial romance. The original video release includes the two lying naked in the surf. Unedited versions were banned from New Zealand and some other countries at the time. The uncensored version was issued on the 1984 "Video EP" issued by Sony on Betamax, VHS and LaserDisc. Versions of the video included on subsequent video and DVD compilations are censored to remove the nudity. The original video went on to win an MTV video award for Best Male Video.
Reception
reviewer David Quantick acknowledged the effect of Nile Rodgers' production on the song, arguing that "nobody but Rodgers could have taken a song like 'China Girl', with its paranoid references to 'visions of swastikas', and turned it into a sweet, romantic hit single". The success of Bowie's cover reportedly led to Pop gaining financial stability via his co-writer residuals.
Live performances
The song was regularly included in Bowie's live shows for the rest of the 1980s and appeared on concert videos in 1983 and 1988 – Serious Moonlight and Glass Spider, respectively. It was rehearsed for Bowie's appearance at the 1985 LondonLive Aid concert but was dropped due to time constraints, along with the songs "Fascination" and "Five Years". Additional live versions of the song appear on 2009's release of a 1999 performance for VH1 Storytellers, on a 2010 release, entitled A Reality Tour, recorded at Bowie's November 2003 concerts in Dublin, Ireland, and on 2018's Glastonbury 2000, recorded at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2000.
