She has been called China's answer to Madonna, Bjork and Kylie Minogue. Which sounds like a heavy burden for one pair of slender young shoulders to bear, but so far Sa Dingding seems to be living up to the hype. Having sold more than two million copies of her 2007 album, Alive, the 24-year-old diva has earned a clutch of awards at home and abroad. In two days' time, if all goes to plan, she will perform to billions of TV viewers at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
Two weeks ago, Sa made her rather more low-key European live debut with two prestigious shows in Britain, at the annual world music festival Womad and the BBC Proms in London's Royal Albert Hall. Modelling a fabulous range of self-made costumes, she sang a polyglot mix of Mandarin, Mongolian, Tibetan and Sanskrit lyrics over a slick fusion of traditional folk instruments and contemporary electronic dance-rock. In between bouts of frenzied headbanging, she played an ancient Chinese zither and a Mongolian horsehair fiddle.
A multilingual singer, choreographer, dancer and clothes designer with the otherworldly beauty of a supermodel, Sa just may be China's first global pop superstar. She already has the marketing muscle of the Universal media conglomerate and the endorsement of MTV China behind her. But the hidden dragon of political scandal could well be stalking this musical crouching tiger, waiting to ambush her plans for world domination.
In interviews, the half-Mongolian Sa claims her mission is to build musical bridges between different eras, countries and cultures. "I want it to lighten people's imagination," she told the US magazine Christian Science Monitor in July. "To provide a road map into ancient Chinese culture, and to what China looks like right now. I want people to have a friendship through my music." Born in Inner Mongolia in 1983, Sa Dingding absorbed the folk music of China's ethnic minorities during her itinerant childhood. After several years living with her Mongolian grandmother, she settled in Beijing with her parents, studying music and philosophy at the Central Conservatory of Music. But she retained a deep cultural connection with her ancestors, a link which inspired her to invent her own language on some tracks.
"I searched deep in my memory for the language my grandmother used to talk to me while I was still a baby," the singer told Britain's Guardian in March. "I think people know how to sing before they know how to speak a language. I believe that everyone experiences this self-created language." But such linguistic flights of fancy can throw up some thorny contradictions. Despite writing lyrics in the Tibetan language, Sa publicly endorses official Chinese policy on the inflammatory issue of independence for Tibet. After expressing this view in an interview with the London-based The Independent newspaper in April, she was dropped from the line-up to Glastonbury, Britain's biggest music festival.
"I am a musician so I concentrate on making music, but I am also Chinese so I definitely support our government policy on this issue," Sa told the paper. "Everyone has their own country and they hope their country can be peaceful and develop well." Whether an artist can be held responsible for their government's policies is a moot point here. The Womad festival bosses clearly had no qualms about booking Sa to perform.
"We book on the basis of how we feel about the music, rather than the political position," insists Womad's programme consultant Paula Henderson. "A country may have a viewpoint but you don't really know if the artist has that viewpoint too. That's why we try to keep ourselves as neutral as possible in these cases. She's probably right in terms of not rocking the boat at this stage. The longer you're established, the more waves you can make."
In other words, Sa may be obliged to play safe on prickly issues for the sake of her career. When pressed on Tibetan independence in more recent interviews, she has taken a much more careful and non-committal line. This is a delicate juggling act, struggling to avoid political controversy both at home and abroad. "There's an element of playing it safe," says the world music writer David Hutcheon, the first British journalist to interview Sa Dingding. "But there's also the idea that if you're living in a totalitarian regime where there is very strict control of the media, how much of the other side of the story do you actually know? I'm pretty sure she'd have an idea of the arguments but if she even mentioned them, that would be the end of her career. She is kind of stuck with that, but I can't really see it holding her back."
Indeed, politics may prove to be the least of Sa's obstacles in conquering the international pop market. Ironically, her heavily polished songs seem to be too "western" for some western audiences. A backlash is already building via online world music discussion forums, especially among purist fans who prefer non-western artists to meet some stringent standards of "authentic" folk tradition. For such people, comparisons with Kylie and Madonna are not compliments.
Even Charlie Gillett, the highly respected BBC World Service DJ and longtime champion of eclectic roots music, found Sa's Albert Hall performance tasteless and overblown. He calls it "a full-on Andrew Lloyd-Webber style theatrical presentation" and "just the kind of thing for an Olympics opening night ceremony". Because Sa is such an eye-catching blend of exotic beauty, colourful costumes and marketable music, some have even suggested she may have been manufactured in the same way as any of the bubblegum stars who dominate the pop charts across the globe - China included. In the West, record labels and Svengali-style managers typically mould such production-line performers. But David Hutcheon has a novel theory about Sa Dingding.
"Is she a pop star or has she been put together by a Chinese committee?" Hutcheon asks, only partly joking. "You look at her, you see the packaging, you hear the music, and you think: if I wanted to come up with a pop star, this is as perfect as Kylie Minogue. But I have spoken to her a couple of times now. I know she makes her own costumes, she does her own choreography, she does all her own music. I'm believing all this, but it really is almost too good to be true."
To her millions of fans, Sa offers a refreshing contemporary fusion of East and West. To her critics, she is a triumph of marketing over music, a short-lived novelty act riding a wave of Olympic fervour. But Paula Henderson insists she has the talent to back up the hype. "Yes, the costumes, the marketing and the image are a great package to present," says Henderson. "For her to have come onto the scene in really just the last 12 months, and to have had such an impact, that is a lot to do with marketing rather than music. She has been pushed very strongly. But at least you feel she stands up to the publicity that goes with the image. She's caught a niche."
Both Paula Henderson and David Hutcheon predict a bright future for Sa Dingding. She may not quite be the Chinese Bjork or Madonna just yet, but with a few adjustments to suit western ears, a great deal of potential is clearly waiting to be unleashed. "At the moment it would be very unkind to compare her to Madonna and Bjork when they've got 20 or 25 years of recording and development behind them," argues Hutcheon. "She's now at the first stage of her career. This is kind of the blank page now. We've seen her come in and show off her roots, but I'm much more excited about seeing how that could evolve and develop. With her next album, she could absolutely change the face of pop music."