China and the Classical Music Boom: From Growth Market to Global Powerhouse

Chinese New Year falls on 3 March. And here in classical music land, you don’t have to search too hard for a story outlining the genre’s tremendous popularity in the world’s second most populous country. 

Two decades ago, we were talking about China as a big potential growth area for classical music. Now we are there. There are an estimated 40 million young people in China learning the piano. One music school alone, the Sichuan Conservatory, reportedly has 10,000 students enrolled. Artists like Yuja Wang have convinced us that Chinese-born musicians are worth listening to for their emotional veracity as well as their technical excellence. 

For those of us living in relatively small European countries, the scale of the Chinese classical music scene – its ambition and its strategy for up-scaling – can be bewildering. I got a taste of it in 2019, when visiting Guangzhou, a southern port city at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta. I was talking to an orchestra administrator named Roger Shi, on the staff of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. At that point, he told me, the GSO’s own Youth Orchestra was involved in the training of 200 conductors, each of which ran their own youth orchestra in the city. 

The numbers seemed incredible. If there are more than 200 youth orchestras in Guangzhou alone, how many are there in the whole of China? It was a startling reflection of the acceleration of the country’s music life. 

New Energies from Deep Roots 

On the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were significantly more than 80 fully professional symphony orchestras in China – the vast majority established since the end of the suppression of Western classical music during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Classical music is seen as a ‘new’ phenomenon in China – from the inside and the outside.  

But that’s not the whole story. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, one of the leading orchestras in the country, was established in 1879 – making it older than the majority of its counterparts in Europe and America. Before the cultural revolution (during which it still played, though generally not music from outside China) the SSO’s diet was similar to most European ensembles while it was often led by leading European musicians. Music from France (the nation of its founding Music Director, Jean Rémusat) and Russia (with which China shares a 4200km land border) were at the heart of its repertoire. 

Plenty would see that as a hangover of aggressive colonialism, and rightly so. The SSO’s interest in French music also stemmed from the French control of parts of the city – notably the area still known as the French Concession in which the SSO’s sleek modern concert hall now resides. But in truth, nobody ‘owns’ such music and anyone, surely, should be allowed to play and enjoy it – whatever the roots of their taste. 

The manner in which China is currently organized, and the authoritarianism of its current regime, are no less controversial than the country’s colonial history. But the country’s curious blend of Marxism and Capitalism has clearly shaped its emerging prowess in classical music, just as it has stoked manufacturing and business. Across business and the arts, success in China has been fueled by the much-practiced Chinese tendency to cherry-pick the best of what it sees other countries doing abroad and imitate them with tremendous effectiveness. 

One example is teaching. China was once known for employing a Soviet-style music education system in which teachers had overbearing control over their pupils. It has made considerable efforts to change that in recent years – readying its graduates more for the realities and opportunities of the contemporary global classical music scene. 

Meanwhile, orchestral academies like that run by the SSO have addressed the problem of highly competent instrumentalists emerging from conservatories with a soloistic playing style and no interest or experience of playing with orchestras. The SSO’s academy is based on what its management sees as a combination of the best of European and America models.

Market Potential 

Go to an orchestral concert in China, and you notice a different demographic from the European norm. On a Sunday night in January some years ago, I was at a SSO concert in which pianist Haochen Zhang was the soloist Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 1 before the orchestra played Sibelius’s Symphony No 2 under conductor Li Xincao. All around me were millennials desperate to see Zhang perform before posting about it on Snow – the restricted Chinese internet’s version of Snapchat. 

Unsurprisingly, plenty of Western businesses have noticed the potential in all this. China is home to nearly a fifth of the world’s population and keeps climbing up the list of classical music’s biggest markets. It currently sits at third place, but how long before it’s second or even first? 

In 2025, the illustrious German record label Deutsche Grammophon launched DG China – a dedicated Chinese imprint. It followed DG celebrating its 120th anniversary in 2018 with a concert not in Berlin, but in Beijing’s Forbidden City. The same year, the Yellow Label signed a multi-album deal with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director, Long Yu. 

Long Yu, who is also Music Director of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, is sometimes referred to as ‘China’s Karajan’. He is a conductor ‘who is making a difference to the cultural landscape inside China, and outside it too’ I was told in 2018 by DG’s CEO Dr Clemens Trautmann. With the apparent support of the administration in Beijing, Yu is using setting up his ensembles in Guangzhou, Shanghai and the capital (he is also Music Director of the China Philharmonic Orchestra) as beacons for the many other fledgling symphony orchestras around the country to follow. 

As DG’s recordings with Yu demonstrate, this is about more than bringing European and American music to Chinese audiences – or assuming that those audiences only want to hear that music played by their own musicians. It’s also about bringing fresh eyes and ideas to the repertoire. Besides, programming in China can be bold. The SSO has programmed concert performances of George Benjamin’s Written On Skin, Britten’s War Requiem and Strauss Elektra and presented sold-out evenings filled with music by Steve Reich. 

Inevitably, different cultures bring different ideas to great works of music and the best orchestras have their own style. Personally, I’ve plenty of experience listening to the music of Jean Sibelius played by Nordic orchestras. I have heard orchestras in China play symphonies by Sibelius, and have been made aware of different nuances in the music as a result – an illuminating process that took me by surprise. 

Two-Way Travel 

Long Yu is part of what some refer to as the ‘golden generation’ of musicians to have emerged following the end of the cultural revolution and the reopening of conservatories in China – notably, 1978, the reopening of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, a key moment in China’s journey to prowess in classical music. The cellist Jian Wang is another. 

Chinese conservatories have grown in tandem with the country’s orchestras. Chinese musicians have long had a tendency to come to Europe to study – notably to Germany, where they receive a high-end conservatory training for free in the hope they might progress into a position in one of that country’s many orchestras or opera houses. But increasing numbers of Chinese musicians are choosing to train at home. 

In response, we have seen conservatories like The Juilliard School set up shop in China. 2019 saw the establishment of Tianjin Juilliard – an outpost of the famous New York school in the North Eastern city of Tianjin, designed to capitalize on the reputation still enjoyed by western institutions in the east.  

Since the introduction of President Xi’s ‘reform and opening up’ policies in 2014, China has appeared to enjoy this cultural dialogue with the west and has certainly benefitted from it. But China also knows, deep down, that it could one day be the dominant partner. The Chinese idea of looking to the west to better its own practices and processes is only aided by the country’s longstanding traditions of patience and pragmatism – the philosophy of ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones.’ In this interesting article on the subject of the phenomenon of Western classical music in China, a conservatoire professor speculates that in a decade’s time, Western instrumentalists will be heading to China to train. 

New Music from China

If China has become the epicenter of the classical music world 50 years from now, the tables of colonialism will truly have been turned. That could have a profound effect on the sort of contemporary classical music being written and enjoyed around the world. 

We’ve already seen flickers of this: a Western fascination with the music of Chinese composers, educated in the Western manner, who manage to write original music that somehow references the essence of their country and its own sonic traditions without resorting to kitsch. Tan Dun is the most prominent example. 

When Deutsche Grammophon signed up Long Yu, the idea was to include new Chinese music in the recordings they would make together. The first included Qigang Chen’s The Five Elements and his Violin Concerto The Joy of Suffering (played by Maxim Vengerov). Another included Xiaogang Ye’s The Song of the Earth, which uses the Chinese poetry also set by Gustav Mahler in his own work of the same name. 

Look out for Chinese-born composers Du Wei, Chou Wen-Chung and Guo Wenjing – all of whom are helping to shift the reputation of Chinese orchestral music from that of poorly-arranged indigenous folk songs to something far more interesting, original and meaningful, if no less connected to the DNA of the country. 

All those talented musicians and orchestras emerging in China remind us that this isn’t about individuals sticking to music from their own country – just as it was never about that when Chinese orchestras started to play Western music. Just as Lang Lang, Yuja Wang, Haochen Zhang, Xuefei Yang and countless others have helped advance our perception of what their instruments can do, so the best Chinese orchestras have vital things to say about the great works of musical literature. It can be highly energizing and interesting to hear them do it.