By ANDREW JACOBS

ZHENJIANG, China - A curious thing happened in October at the Midi Music Festival, China’s oldest and boldest agglomeration of rock, funk, punk and electronica.

Performers musically criticized the country’s leaders, tattooed college students sold antigovernment T-shirts and an unruly crowd of heavy metal fans giddily torched a Japanese flag that had been emblazoned with expletives.

Curious, because the event, a four-day free-for-all of Budweiser, crowd-surfing and camping, was sponsored by the local Communist Party, which spent $2.1 million to turn cornfields into festival grounds, pay the growling punk bands and clean up the detritus left by 80,000 attendees.

The city cadres also provided an army of white-gloved police officers, earplugs in place . The incongruity of security agents facilitating the sale of cannabis- themed merchandise was not lost on the festival’s organizer, Zhang Fan. “The government used to see rock fans as something akin to a devastating flood or an invasion of savage beasts,” said Mr. Zhang, a handful of whose events have been canceled by skittish bureaucrats since he pioneered the Chinese music festival in 2000. “Now we’re all part of the nation’s quest for a harmonious society.”

He is not complaining, nor are the dozens of malnourished musicians who finally have a way to monetize their craft . The shift in official sentiment ? and among state-backed companies paying to have their logos splashed across the stage ? has led to an explosion of festivals across China. In 2008, there were five multiday concerts, nearly all in Beijing.

This year there have already been more than 60, from the northern grasslands of Inner Mongolia to the southern highlands of Yunnan Province. Without exception the festivals have been staged with the help of local governments that have come to realize that pierced rockers flailing around a mosh pit are not necessarily interested in upending single-party rule.

More importantly, the governments have decided, for now at least, that music festivals can deliver something that even the most seasoned propagandists cannot spin out of thin air: coolness.

Too much of a good thing, however, can have its downside. Crowds have thinned as events compete for the limited pool of fans able to afford the 150 yuana- day (about $22) admission. Another problem is that China’s independent music scene is still in its adolescence, with quality and originality in short supply. Skeptics say the government is simply trying to co-opt youth culture .

Yang Haisong of P.K.14 could not help but feel cynical as he looked around at the Modern Sky Music Festival in Beijing. “The government used to see us as dangerous,” he said. “Now they see us as a market.”