“China’s piano boom has gone quietly bust,” critic Norman Lebrecht wrote last month. “New piano sales in China are thought to be down to half of the peak 400,000 and the resale value has plummeted. An upright piano bought at 50,000 RMB fetches less than one-tenth of the purchase price in online sales sites.”
New piano sales fell from a pre-Covid peak of 400,000 in 2019 to 200,000 in 2022. China’s imports of pianos—mainly high-end instruments for conservatory and professional use–fell from a 2021 peak of US$272 million to $197 million in 2023.
The Chinese still buy ten times as many pianos as Americans. But the confluence of the Covid epidemic and a weak housing market reversed the biggest classical music boom in history.
Added to this is a quiet rebellion by young Chinese against the exhausting demands of elite education in China—part of the trend that the Chinese have dubbed “lying flat.”
“According to statistics, there were 650,000 music schools and 25,000 piano shops in China in early 2022, but around 30% had closed down by the end of 2022,” the Singapore website ThinkChina reported.
The sudden attrition of classical music studies may have deleterious consequences that China’s education establishment doesn’t foresee, impeding China’s ambition to become a scientific superpower.
Music provides a unique refuge for intellectual and emotional freedom in China’s hierarchical society. In the West, classical music and scientific accomplishment have been close companions since the Renaissance. Music may play an even greater role in China.
With at least 40 million music students (some estimates are much higher), China teaches more classical music than the rest of the world combined. Proficiency at an instrument remains a de facto entrance requirement for some elite high schools.
But classical performance demands hours of daily practice for the 14 million young Chinese who will take the formidable Gaokao college entrance examination each year. Many of them eschew the required discipline and sacrifice.
The market for acoustic pianos, to be sure, isn’t as bad as it sounds: The Chinese continue to buy digital instruments, better suited to piano practice in a small apartment.
One consulting firm projects a 9.4% annual growth rate in total keyboard sales between 2023 and 2030. But the sharp decline in acoustic piano sales implies a decline in advanced musical studies.
Many young Chinese reject the pressure cooker of entrance exams and long workweeks in favor of Western-style slacking and lifestyle flexibility.
Attrition of China’s celebrated work ethic remains limited, according to recent studies by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, but it worries Chinese authorities, who fear that the West’s slacker culture will spread to China’s youth.
The freefall in China’s piano market reflects a turnabout in official education policy, ThinkChina explained. “The piano craze truly took off in China around 2008, when China implemented a policy allowing art students who attained Grade 10 in piano to earn extra points for their zhongkao (Senior High School Entrance Examination). This sparked off a wave of parents all over the country signing their children up to learn piano, in turn spurring a large market for piano lessons and exams.”
Piano ownership and piano lessons for children were badges of social status for China’s burgeoning middle class. In 2021, Chinese authorities introduced the so-called “double reduction” directive, which reduced the homework burden for Chinese grade school pupils and restricted private tutoring. The new rule collapsed China’s private tutoring industry, and musical instruction suffered collateral damage.
“Chinese children won the battle of the piano practice,” wrote Richard Spencer in The Times of London on April 1. “President Xi has proved to be sympathetic to the plight of children burdened by competitive parents with ever more work, particularly English lessons. In 2021 he banned some after-school classes.”
Beijing worried about the effects of the educational pressure cooker on overworked children. It also wanted to level the playing field, where private tutoring gave the advantage to affluent families.
Until 2018, Chinese students received extra credit for musical achievement on the zhonkao examination for secondary-school selection. Chinese authorities eliminated this as an egalitarian measure. And then came the Covid epidemic.
A decline in music studies might seem a minor matter in the great scheme of things. In a hierarchical society with limited room for individual expression, though, it provides a unique realm of freedom for fecund young minds.
Official education policy, meanwhile, is nudging music students towards traditional Chinese instruments, whose sales have surged. That fits into the Communist Party of China’s effort to promote national culture.
Sales of traditional instruments rose by 15% to 20% a year between 2018 and 2024, while piano sales fell by more than 30% between 2021 and 2023, according to Tencent News. Chinese music conservatories now require students to pass an examination in traditional music.
Despite the rapid growth (from a low base), absolute numbers for sales of Chinese traditional instruments remain low. The most popular of these, the Chinese zither (guzheng), sells 100,000 units a year, according to the Chinese Musical Instruments Association.
The music curriculum in public schools now emphasizes Chinese folk music and traditional instruments, while elite music conservatories require students to pass exams in ancient Chinese music.
The Communist Party’s egalitarian and nationalist turn in music education might vitiate its greater strategic objective, to make China a scientific superpower.
Not by accident, classical music has been the avocation of Western mathematicians and physicists for centuries. Einstein was an excellent violinist, Heisenberg was a child prodigy whose first career choice was the piano (and sometimes accompanied Einstein), Max Planck played several instruments and composed operas, Werner von Braun was a composition student of Paul Hindemith, Ludwig Boltzmann was a classical pianist who studied with Bruckner, and so forth.
Western classical composition is the only music that creates a sense of the future. The listener anticipates a return to a tonal goal, and this anticipation makes possible suspense, surprise and even humor.
Time is not a metric imposed from the outside, but rather is constituted by the malleable sequence of musical events. It unifies emotional drive with problem-solving. It enables the musician to create new worlds, but not arbitrary ones, for the musical materials drawn from mature are the same ones embodied in prehistoric bone flutes.
The heroic age of musical composition ended around the turn of the 20th century, but classical music won’t go away. It is the only kind of music that can tell a story, as the music theorist Carl Schachter says, and the movies can’t do without it. John Williams might not be Dvorak, but he’s the next best thing.
Classical music integrates thought and emotion. Without emotion, there is no thought. Kant insisted that we cannot know the true nature of objects of perception, of “things-in-themselves,” but only our perceptions of objects as conditioned by our innate sense of space and time.
Hegel retorted (in “Philosophy of Right”) that we “know” objects of perception by making them our own and putting them to our use; we know what they are when we know what they are for.
Hegel’s insight was defined by Husserl as “intentionality”; we do not simply absorb sense perception as on a blank wax tablet, but constitute them by our intent.
Thought always is intentional. In a free society, it is contentious; we engage in the free exchange of ideas, demolish inadequate concepts and propose better ones. Creative thought presupposes what Hegel called civil society (better, “a society of citizens”) with the freedom to upend the received wisdom.
That is why classical music has disproportionate importance for China, which never in its 5,000 years of cultural development succeeded in cultivating a robust civil society—what Hegel called “the realm of freedom.”
The Chinese remain imperial subjects rather than free citizens. The imperial hierarchy transmits ideological guidelines down the chain of command. There is no parliament, no town meeting, no assembly of Presbyters to debate policy.
The notion of opinion in China remains wan and abstract; one may have an idiosyncratic view of one policy or another, but there exists no institution to give it social expression. Hierarchy stifles thought.
Western classical music gave the Chinese a refuge of individuality in which emotion and thought have free interplay. Chinese parents insisted that their children learn piano or violin not merely because it was a badge of social prestige, but because it made them more intelligent.
By the same token, Eastern Europeans under Communist rule embraced classical music as an island of personal freedom. China’s most effective institutions embraced Western classical culture for the same reason.
Huawei, China’s national champion in digital technology, built an R&D campus in Shenzhen with scale reproductions of some of the West’s most beautiful architecture, for just this reason.
In a 2023 essay for The American Mind, I recounted a tour of Huawei’s Oxhorn campus. “There is a library modeled on France’s Bibliothèque Nationale with its famous dome, a German castle, a French chateau, and Italian cobbled streets. Incongruously, exercise classes filled with Huawei employees dressed in regulation gray t-shirts and black shorts puff through reconstructed 18th-century towns,” I wrote.
“Mr Ren [Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei] believes that classical art and architecture foster creativity, which is what Huawei expects from its researchers,” my minder at the Oxhorn Campus explained. She had danced with one of China’s main corps de ballet and played classical flute, with a predilection for Bach.
Beijing, though, put its thumb on the cultural scales in favor of traditional Chinese art forms, starting with the 2017 “Aesthetic Education” reforms directing schools to bring traditional music into the curriculum.
In 2022, the Communist Party promulgated a new curriculum based on what it calls “cultural confidence,” emphasizing both “traditional Chinese culture” and “revolutionary culture.” The new guidelines favor traditional Chinese music over Western classical music.
Western music, though, developed capacities that Chinese music can’t aspire to. Chinese traditional music employs a pentatonic scale (like a great deal of folk music from around the world).
The five-tone scale lacks the leading tone of the seven-tone diatonic scale of Western music, with its half-step “leading tone” (“si” to “do”) that makes possible a concluding cadence on the dominant tone.
Pentatonic music can be charming in its own way, but it lacks the sense of closure that makes long-range goal-oriented motion possible.
This 15th-century innovation of Western music is one of the great achievements of the human spirit, a revolution in aesthetics that never occurred in China. It occurred simultaneously with the invention of perspective in painting, another unique accomplishment of Western art.
Classical music emerged as a popular undertaking, not an elite pastime. In the Saxony where J.S. Bach grew up, sight-singing of four-part chorales was a requirement in the new system of compulsory elementary education.
So far, this is only a matter of emphasis in China. Gangs of Red Guards aren’t smashing Western musical instruments as they did during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution—quite the contrary.
Concerts by visiting Western orchestras sell out in major Chinese cities as fast as Taylor Swift events in the West. China is proud of its citizens’ prowess in classical music. But the air pocket in piano sales and instrumental instruction is a small dark cloud on China’s horizon.
Follow David P Goldman on X at @davidpgoldman
