structural:summarization, quality:corruption
China (PRC)

Prior to the 1980s, foreign music and art were prohibited in mainland China for most of three decades, and love songs were almost non-existent, aside from political and red songs, which heavily dominated the country's cultural domain. They were commonly revolutionary model operas promoting the ideals of the party and military. Jin Zhaojun, a prominent Chinese music critic, characterised the music during this period as "overly masculine and lacking in femininity", in which people were denied a whole range of basic human desires and modes of expression. Teng's music, in this regard, broke new ground in terms of style and content. She blended traditional Chinese folk music with Western pop and jazz, opening the doors to the musical creations of later generations. Musicians began to study the new forms of music that entered the mainland through foreign cassettes and tape recorders, such as orchestration and singing style. She became the earliest guide for composers on how to arrange music for popular songs, and numerous musicians reproduced their work by imitating her. An important piece of testimony to this is the use of saxophone introduced by Teng. Her frequent use of jazz or jazz-influenced ensembles in her music set the standard for saxophone performance practice in mainland pop today. Another aspect of Teng's influence was the establishment of a "breath singing method". Jin pointed out that, before this, alongside more authentic folk singing, the Chinese also had a "national singing" between bel canto and folk singing. Teng taught that people could also sing with another part of their voice, which was later named "popular singing".

Teng's songs were centred on a range of subjects, most primarily love and human relations—the most lacking elements in mainland culture at the time. By the early 1970s, as rates of radio ownership began to increase, especially of cheap and portable transistor models, listening to Teng's music became the primary attraction. Author Ah Cheng recalled hearing her music for the first time in 1975 as a sort of excitement and extreme addiction that he and his friends would press their ears to the wooden frame of a shortwave radio only to get her voice heard. His account of his internal exile in the mountains of Yunnan is better representative of this phenomenon:

Yunnan was endowed with a magnificent geographical gift: you could hardly hear central people's radio, and the newspaper would take days to make its way into the mountains and then be collected at the party's secretary's house, where you could ask him to tear off a strip when you wanted to roll up a cigarette. For people who listen to enemy radio, radio from the center or the official newspaper was merely a supplemental reference. But listening to enemy radio was not about political news so much as entertainment. I remember that whenever the Australian national station broadcast a radio play of the Taiwanese film The Story of a Small Town everyone would bring their own radio because the shortwave signal would tend to drift and that way we could cover the entire frequency range and make sure we had continuous sound from at least one receiver at a time. The boys and girls sitting around that grass hut would be in tears! Especially when Teresa Teng's voice rang out, emotions would rise to a fever pitch – her voice was to die for.

The popularity of Teng's music among her listeners marked the birth of China's fan culture. Without the technology to communicate, fans organised their own groups of fandom by sharing her tapes or discussing her music together. Teng's music fandom is considered the earliest stage of the development of the Chinese pop culture fandom, before which no popular media could be found. In 1977, Teng's popular love song " The Moon Represents My Heart " was released; it became one of the first foreign songs to break into the country. Her songs over the following decade revolutionized Chinese popular culture, which marked the end of the extremely tight control exercised in the preceding three decades by the communist party over Chinese society and culture.

Author Ah Cheng cited Teng's songs, an inspiration for the revival of popular culture on the mainland. Wu'erkaixi, a Chinese political commentator of Uyghur heritage, asserted that the youngsters who listened to her songs discovered the desire for the pursuit of freedom through her singing voice. He adds that "to the Chinese, Deng Lijun was a great person. If Deng Xiaoping brought economic freedom to China, she brought liberation of the body and free thinking to China."

According to Nobel Peace Prize laureate and writer Liu Xiaobo, "Teng's romantic songs reawakened our soft centers by dismantling the cast-iron frame work of our "revolutionary wills," melting our cold, unfeeling hearts, reviving sexual desires, and liberating our long-suppressed human softness and tenderness." Filmmaker Jia Zhangke said that Teng's songs were a big inspiration that drove his curiosity towards cinema. He relates: "Her songs represented a massive transformation in the cultural landscape of China at that time. Prior to the 1980s, China had no popular culture to speak of. The closest thing we had were revolutionary model operas and things made in that mould. Everything around us was structured collectively: we, but Teng's songs, on the other hand, were entirely new at the time.. they evoked individual desire: me, changing everything." Regarding her contribution to the development of the music industry in China, Wang Xiaofeng at Sanlian Lifeweek wrote, "Teng not only pioneered the development of popular music but also stimulated the rapid development of audio-video companies at that time." He stated that listening to tapes was one of the main cultural activities and that they were luxury goods, but this did not stop ordinary people from consuming them. In 1979, there were only a few audio-video distribution companies in the Mainland. By 1982, it had increased to 300, indicating Teng's music as the trailblazer for this change.