"We want to be a dangerous band, like Fugazi or The Clash or Bob Dylan. Woody Guthrie's folk music influenced me a lot," Yang said. "But because the government doesn't care about us, we are not forbidden from playing. Maybe we are not dangerous. It's sad."

I'm sorry, but anyone whose music appears on "Friends" is not dangerous. Furthermore:

It was voted as the best album of the year in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics poll. In 1998 Q magazine readers voted London Calling the 32nd greatest album of all time; Rolling Stone named it the best album of the 1980s (although it was released in 1979 in the UK, its U.S. release was in 1980) in 2000, and in 2003 named it number 8 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time"; also in 2003, the TV network VH1 placed it at number 25. Pitchfork Media ranked it number two on their Top 100 Albums of the 1970s. In 2004, Entertainment Weekly named it the Greatest rock album of all-time.

They go on:

"We are trying to change the image of punk rockers. We just want to tell the audience that the music is pure and that we are nice and not violent."

Many punk rockers in China are long on style and short on substance, critics say. Few of them can articulate what they stand for or explain what their songs mean.

So which way do they want it? The scene seems split on the most basic issues.

China's Punks Look to Rock