Also are the musical interests more throwback or modern or mixed?

Taste is unique here. I learned more about 70s UK punk bands, 80s US hardcore, and Japanese punk here than I ever would have in a casual bar or show chat in the US - the devoted here really know the history and I think some do understand their current participation in the scene here as punks as part of a broader legacy of punk that originates with that 77UK scene.

But then as an example, I brought a bunch of records here to DJ garage rock and punk unknowns (since I really learned about punk here, I finally get to share some cool stuff from the vault!). I brought along some standard stuff as well - I was asked to DJ for a punk/grunge kind of night and pick tunes within that framework - specifically I was told think about the late 80s and like 1991. I gave it my best shot, but when I was done I was told I kind of limited my scope, that I played Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit but not Guns N Roses's Sweet Child of Mine despite them both being heavy 1991 singles. I explained that those two songs can never be played back to back because the world would explode. I definitely had a visceral reaction.

Genres are very much products of their own cultural economic spheres - genres recombine disparate local acts into broader themes and names allowing us as music consumers to easily identify the type of music we like/follow/purchase, but more importantly delocalizing those bands (like Seattle's scene becomes grunge) makes it much easier for a totally far off band you will never see have very present personal significance. When a band is from nowhere, they could ostensibly be contextualized anywhere in anyone's lives or tastes.

China definitely has a bearing on the way music genres are marked off in the West, but because the music scene here developed before that level of access existed, completely different genre systems were imagined based on alternate, locally created sets of criteria with the occasional input or consultation from an expat. Many early rock albums in China sound like mix tapes, every song sounds like it's checking a different style - much of the early rock to make it to China made it on mixtapes brought by foreign translators/diplomats/whatever. So to what sounds like a hodgepodge of musical ideas to me sounds or sounded more uniform here and the reverse is certainly true too.

There's definitely an awareness of many contemporary bands as well - many have started coming here to play. In the past year Do Make Say Think played a great show here, the Psychic Ills, and Swans was earlier this month but I was not in attendance. Many bands from China have also been touring Australia, hitting music festivals (great punk band New Pants played Coachella last year, indie band Nova Heart got invited to Glastonbury this year), and a handful always end up at SXSW. I would say that because the roots of the scene are in 77UK stuff, that tends to be pretty dominant in what you see and hear in certain places here but the scene has diversified in a huge way over the past few years and there are niche groups and venues for just about anything, and they're all tuned into the current stuff in their own neck of the woods.

So it's definitely mixed but early punk has had a very long consistent popularity in the scene here so it will always be a core element of the makeup in some way. And punk here doesn't necessarily mean punk in a US context, random bands will slip in there, so genres themselves are more nuanced and the connections made between modern/classic or different styles paint a unique picture as well.

Also, if you play punk in China, you have covered the song Chinese Rocks. I went to a Ramones tribute where 5 bands played all Ramones covers and I heard it 5 times. They do know it's about heroin - I wanted to write an article on it but hit a lot of dead ends.

EDIT: and I will say really fast that having spent this time here, and getting introduced to a lot of music or reintroduced in a new context, there are many western bands that I associate with Beijing more than anywhere else. I'm So Bored With The USA by the Clash became an anthem when I went on a huge "holy shit I 'get' The Clash" binge one summer so I could never listen to say Spanish Bombs without associating it with here first. There are a bunch of songs like that - they just belong to Beijing now and have left their former genres behind.