Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music, by Richard Curt Kraus

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Richard Curt Kraus. Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

In his book, “Piano and politics in China”, Kraus chose an unique perspective----the reception of Western music in the People’s Republic China (PRC)--to discuss the struggles over cultural policy which have characterized politics in Maoist China.

“Tension” is the key word in this book. The introduction of Western music into China cause tensions because of “its foreignness in a century of China’s rebellion against foreign domination” (viii), and because it is alien to the peasant majority of China’s population. But the result of Western “music imperialism” was not a simple conflict between Chinese traditional music and Western imports. In fact, defenders of traditional music had to face the attack from two other parties: from “cosmopolitans”, who devoted themselves to promoting the Western classics, and from “populists”, who adopted Western instruments and musical techniques in order to produce stirring martial tunes and revolutionary operas for the “masses”. The consequence of this tension is a three-sided struggle. Kraus imposed major attention to the contradiction between latter two because it reflects the ever-changing political status of the “bourgeois middle class” in socialist China, which is governed by the peasant-rooted Communists.

Western music was embraced by China’s urban middle class, composed of capitalists, bourgeoisie and intellectuals, the only minority of China’s population. This status group preferred Western forms of music not just for the pleasure it provides, but because it has been associated at various times with social prestige, and because it is seen as a manifestation of progressive culture. However, the majority of China’s peasantry and working class and the governing Chinese Communist Party, which initially had strong roots in “masses”, decided a preference for populist form of culture. The urban middle class were viewed with considerable suspicion and hostility in China’ revolutionary century.

Thus comes a series of tension: the gap between urban cosmopolitans and China’s “masses”; the dilemma for Communist Party between the need for urban middle class’s useful skills and the suspicion of their political stability; the contradiction feeling between the responsibility feeling of “serve the masses” and their natural elitist self-identification. Also, the same thing reflected in China’s music politics history. One group of Chinese musician believed that Western music must be emulated because it is “scientific” while the other was faithful to populist side, trying to eschew western music in favor of updating China’s own national music, using for mobilize the workers and peasants of the PRC. The communist party authority, although in certain period embrace both sides, actually act in a long run suppressed the former and encouraged the development of national music. This music policy trend went through anti-rightist campaign, Great Leap Forward, and reach peak during Cultural Revolution, when the Maoist radical politicians view western music as virulent weed and tried to annihilate it in China.

Kraus illustrates these tensions through an interesting exploration of the lives and fluctuating fortunes of modern China’s most outstanding musicians. The first figure is the composer Xian Xinghai (1905-1945). Xian studied in Paris Conservatory, later joined the Communist Party and was praised as “people’s musician” (p.65). His career life reflected the tension between the demands for populist music in an age of mass mobilization and revolution and the bourgeois music of Europe. Xian’s famous Yellow River Cantata was such effort to bring Chinese and Western instrument together. Died before Communist’s victory, Xian’s populism has been exaggerated and his cosmopolitan side diminished for political reasons after liberation. His Yellow River Cantata and other revolutionary song were popular throughout China, but the compositions that he himself regarded most highly are infrequently played (p.68).

The remaining three figures are China’s most highly praised piano virtuosos-----Fou Ts’ong, Yin Chengzong, and Liu Shiku. With same middle class family background and parallel virtuosity and international claim, they ended up with very different histories and political stances. Fu Ts’ong, after his father, Fu Lei, one of the top intellectuals in China being labeled as rightist, became alienated from the Communist China and defected in 1959. But two decades years later he gain political rehabilitation, which was accompanied at each step by well-managed propaganda. ”His career as an artist continued to follow channels shaped by political reaction to his background of social privilege” (p.99). Yin Chengzong catered for the radical politics of the Cultural Revolution and became the top piano virtuoso during the whole CR (Fou Ts’ong defected to west, Liu Shikun was in jail and Gu Shengyin made suicide), but after Mao’s death he was purged. He then went to American to resume his performing career; Li Shikun married the daughter of Ye Jianying and became unavoidably tied in to Chinese factional politics. He was thrown into jail during Cultural Revolution, leased out and rose to high official status after CR, and thrown into jail again after his divorce with Ye’s daughter and Ye’s death. Through the lives of these four men and other musicians, Kraus illustrated the middle class musicians’ struggle in music politics and the tension arose from it.

Two points in Kraus’s book may make readers a little upset: First, he is a little prejudiced with controversy about the music. Kraus tried to put China’s cultural conflicts in a world economy perspective, arguing that China is at the furthest edge of an expanding western international order. Ridiculously, Kraus presumes, at least indirectly, that music is “an ideology, a beguiling form of false consciousness” (p.197), with a myth of international language perpetuated by citizens from powerfully nations who need to “petrify their cultural influence over weaker peoples” (ix). Second, his argument about Western culture excluded the western popular culture. So when he includes the 1980s cultural policy, his discussion became problematic. But this is really a great historian work by political science scholar and deserves a wide audience.

Jun Zhang