Classical Music in China, Part I

I suppose one could say it was inevitable; someday, someone, somewhere would take notice and realize, “Hey there’s an awful lot of really good Chinese musicians in China,” and follow up by writing an article insinuating the inevitable arrival of China’s musical dominance in the realm of “Western Art Music”, for lack of a better term. I suppose at first glance it seems obvious: with one-third of the world population, most of it seemingly experiencing an intense obsession for all things “Western” (more on that another time), Classical music just seems like the sort of thing the Chinese would take an intense liking to as well. Then you encounter people like Lang Lang, or Li Yundi, or Yu Zhenyang (mentioned on the NY Times article), and you would probably feel vindicated.

The thing is, this New York Times article, like everything we read in the media about China (and this follows a time-honored tradition dating back to our first encounters with the Middle Kingdom), presents a gross oversimplification of something they have seen happen in Beijing and Shanghai, which together amount to, at most, 3 percent of the Chinese population. We try so hard to understand China, to compartmentalize it, to cut it up into pieces your average “Western” reader can understand that we start to see patterns that aren’t really there because we’ve taken so much detail out of the picture. It’s kind of like looking at Monet’s famous “Japanese Footbridge” series via Google Earth, seeing only the green, and deciding Monet has gone minimalist.

I have lived in China as a Classical musician for three years now, and I have seen how a typical Chinese Symphony orchestra operates, and a few blatant omissions come to mind.

One should remember that, free market economy and all, all of this love for western culture exists because the Chinese Communist Party has decided it should exist. The principal aim of Reform and Opening was to open China up to the rest of the world economically, not culturally. Many might argue with me to the contrary, and you’re welcome to do that, but I think the Chinese are just too proud a people to have just decided overnight they wanted to be more Western. They, namely the Chinese government at the time, primarily wanted, and still want, access to Western capital. They saw what poverty and isolation looked like, both during the Great Leap Forward and during the Cultural Revolution, and I think they were done with that. Plus they would have seen the writing on the wall when looking at what the USSR was starting to turn into by the late 70s.

Call me a cynic, but I also think an awful lot of people who were warm and cozy in their newfound wealth as part of the power structure in Beijing circa 1970 didn’t like being told they weren’t “Communist” enough during the Cultural Revolution, and highly resented being sent to re-education camps in the countryside at the hands of peasants. (One must remember that Chinese society, even today, is very hierarchical. People will not feel comfortable speaking to, much less approach someone who is perceived as being more powerful. It still baffles me how a society run on Confucian principles of hierarchy and deference to authority for thousands of years, becomes Communist. As a side note, Deng Xiao Ping, the man credited with creating and implementing Reform and Opening, was one of those unlucky enough to have been re-educated, and later rehabilitated.) It is no surprise that the Cultural Revolution is referred to by the current leadership as an “unfortunate mistake.”

One of the things about opening up your economy to America, Europe, etc. is that you open up to their culture also. You can’t do business with foreigners on a large scale, which is what Reform and Opening sought to do, and not expect their cultural mores to enter and influence people. I think the leadership realized it, saw it as a necessary evil in their plan to “modernize China” economically, and let it happen. Naturally, a lot of people took to many Western cultural practices, and they took to them for some of the same reasons we have taken to them; going to the movies, shopping, using the internet and going to concerts among other things is fun and makes life more interesting. In this way, “Western” culture has a very convenient side-effect and it has taught the Chinese leadership an important lesson; given that it’s fun, it’s a little like a narcotic in that it makes people forget the day to day frustrations of living in an economy and a society transitioning from a planned system to a market system. If people think they’re happy, then they are less likely to complain en masse. This happens in the U.S. as well I think.

The gap between rich and poor is amazingly large, but nobody talks about it. First, people are too busy trying to “beat the Jones’,” or simply trying to get their own piece of the pie. It’s early enough in the process so there is still a great deal of enthusiasm. Second, is people have an instinctive idea here about what you can and can’t talk about. The Xinhua News Agency won’t talk about it, and bloggers risk having their sites shut down if they go too far down that road. But the gap and discontent is there. Go to Shanghai or Shenzhen, with all the lights, glitter, and spas, and then go to Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, or even to Changsha, capital of Hunan Province, and you will come face to face with it.

What this means for Classical music in particular is that, though somewhat unlikely today, the Chinese People’s Congress could turn on a dime and declare Classical music “undesirable”, or some other subtle term, in essence “disappearing it” from the country. Classical music is disappearing from the radio waves and the concert halls in the United States for many reasons, which I won’t list here, but it’s a process that has taken quite a few years to unfold. In China this could happen overnight if the Communist leadership decided it so simply because of the cultural power they wield. In other words, the current love affair China as a country has with Western Classical music is not necessarily long term, or a fait accompli by anyone’s definition.

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