A Decade of Change

I started my doctoral research in 2014, and by the time my monograph The Western Classical Music Industry in Twenty-First Century China A Dialectical Crescendo is published in 2025, more than a decade will have passed. In those years, China’s political atmosphere, market environment, societal musical tastes, and broader cultural economy have changed significantly and often unpredictably.

This makes me hesitant to claim that my research is “timely” in any straightforward way. But then again, that was never really the point. What I’ve tried to do is develop a framework that helps make sense of how the classical music industry in China has taken shape, and how it works. I believe such a paradigm can offer not just insight, but a critical way of thinking about cultural change and contradiction.

Back around 2013–2014, Western classical music industry in Chinawas beginning to show signs of fatigue, even as it still looked strong on the surface. The most obvious example was in the education market, particularly piano. At its height, over 40 million children were reported to be studying piano (People’s Daily, 2015). That number was often repeated in media and policy circles as a sign of a booming music economy. And it wasn’t just about music—it was about aspiration, about middle-class families investing in a better future for their kids, about cultural prestige.

Much of this enthusiasm had been shaped by the success stories of Lang Lang and Li Yundi, who came to embody a kind of national pride and individual genius. They were everywhere: on state television, in international collaborations, in textbook case studies. Their fame helped fuel a widespread belief that classical music—especially the piano—could open doors to global opportunity. This wasn’t just about art. It was about desire, upward mobility, and belonging to a certain vision of modern China. Like Jeroen de Kloet has written as a kind of utopian desire called Europe as façade (2013)—the longing for sophistication, global connection, and cultural legitimacy, especially after the Cultural Revolution.

At the same time, not everyone had equal access. Cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen became hubs for performance and cultural investment, while rural and smaller cities were largely left out. Local governments poured money into concert halls and festivals in the hope of attracting top-tier international orchestras. According to a 2018 report from China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, more than 90% of major classical events were concentrated in just a handful of cities. For many of these urban centers, classical music became a way to brand themselves as “world-class” and “cultured.” These efforts often ignored cost or sustainability—what mattered was image.

But this boom didn’t last forever. In the years that followed, things began to shift. The economy slowed—from 7.3% growth in 2014 to just over 5% by 2023 (World Bank, 2024)—and cultural policy under Xi Jinping began to emphasize nationalism and “cultural confidence” (文化自信). Gradually, Western classical music no longer seemed like a must-have marker of middle-class/new rich identity. Instead, it became optional—and, in some cases, suspect.

The cultural confidence campaign reported by Global Times (Chinese state-affiliated nationalist tone paper)

Source: Tidesignt.com: Annual Count of Newly Registered Piano-Related Businesses in China (2019–2023)

The disillusionment didn’t happen all at once. But gradually, families started to turn away from the piano as the obvious path for their children. Part of this had to do with shifting tastes. Part of it came from public scandals, overexposure, or a sense that the Lang Lang and Li Yundi stories weren’t as untouchable as they once seemed. And part of it reflected deeper changes in what people now value: more individual, more eclectic, more localized forms of expression. Parents started encouraging their children to explore other interests—from folk and jazz to traditional Chinese instruments and digital music production (I have more Chinese young friends play DAWs than piano at this time).

This cooling of enthusiasm has been slow but steady. And I don’t see it as a “decline” in a negative sense. Rather, it points to something more interesting: a shift in how music, education, and cultural identity are entangled. It’s a story about aspiration, class, nationalism, and changing definitions of taste. And to understand it, we need more than statistics or policy papers—we need to think critically about how ideas travel, who gets to speak for “high culture,” and why people turn toward or away from certain musical forms.

These are the questions that have stayed with me throughout this long research journey. And while the China I first studied in 2014 looks quite different from the one I’m writing about now, the desire to understand these shifting dynamics has remained constant. If anything, the changes make the work feel more necessary—not less.

However, this transformation has not been sudden; rather, it has unfolded gradually over time. Western music institutions (orchestras, festivals, schools) continue to seek opportunities in the Chinese market, where the once-hyped tens of millions of piano students have now grown up. Many of them are becoming an emerging force in the commercial live music sector, simultaneously exploring alternative pathways to turn their musical backgrounds into both economic capital and symbolic gain, maybe audiences, consumers, reviewer writers, or even industrial workers.

Western classical music, meanwhile, continues to hold a unique position in China as a genre perceived to be "apolitical" while symbolising openness and cosmopolitanism (see my monograph Chapter 1&2). This veneer of neutrality grants it a certain depoliticized political value—a space where soft power and cultural distinction can be enacted without overt ideological confrontation. Yet beneath this surface, classical music may also carry traces of conservative standardization. It subtly resists the de-centering impulses found in recent global music education reforms that emphasize cultural diversity, informal learning, and epistemological pluralism. As recent case shows the leading Chinese music educator and musicologist Haihong Zhou’s editorial direction for the new national music textbook, which mandates that students learn staff notation as dominant required music skills continuously from primary through secondary education - which means staff notation is still an advanced music skills over others according to authorities.

Bringing Staff Notation into the Classroom: Zhou Haihong on Redefining Music Education in China’s New Era

So, the ongoing trajectory of western classical music in China may not simply be one of decline or persistence, but rather a recalibration—one that reflects broader tensions between globalisation and nationalism, professionalism and participation, and centralization and cultural multiplicity. As such, classical music could serve as a critical site for rethinking how aesthetic authority, institutional legacy, and educational ideology converge in shaping the future of China’s music industries.