Petroc Trelawny visits the world’s largest piano factory in the country where under Mao it was dangerous to play the instrument
As my plane makes its final approach into the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the mountains give way briefly to green paddy fields, and then industry takes over. Beneath are hundreds of vast blue-roofed sheds and smoking red-brick chimney stacks. The landscape is mapped with railway marshalling yards and lorry parks; heavily laden barges crawl along the creeks of the Pearl River. With a massive economy that’s now larger than that of nearby Hong Kong, Guangdong Province deserves its title as the factory of China.
I’ve come here to visit a company that last year made 100,000 pianos — that’s almost one instrument for every minute of the working day. The Pearl River Piano Company management says it’s now the world’s largest. Three thousand staff work eight production lines; it feels more like a car factory than a place making things as delicate and tactile as pianos. Walking around the plant, the smell of wood and varnish hangs in the air, the noise of sawing and drilling mingling with the resonant sound of hammers striking strings, and instruments being tuned over and over again. The company representative tells me not to photograph any of the machinery without checking with her first; industrial espionage, she says, is something the company is very aware of.
A basic Pearl River piano costs about £800, a fortune to many Chinese, but well within the budget of the country’s burgeoning urban middle class. Their new wealth, combined with a desire to see their offspring have a better childhood than they did, has led to an obsession with the piano in China. Conservative estimates suggest that 30 million Chinese children are currently learning the instrument; many reckon the figure is much higher. One academic told me the country was in the grip of a ‘piano fever’.
The evidence is all around. Looking for a Pearl River piano in Shanghai, I was told to head for Jin Ling Dong Street. I stopped counting after I’d passed 35 independent shops selling pianos and other instruments, none of them short of customers. In Best Friend Music, the largest, a power-station worker and his wife were selecting a model for their ten-year-old daughter. ‘I never had the chance to learn music,’ he says. ‘She will grow up a better person, a more rounded individual.’ ‘The discipline will be good,’ his wife adds. ‘It will make her concentrate.’ In Beijing I visit a branch of the Jiang Jie piano school, housed in a building above a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. A spiral staircase rising up six floors is lined with tiny piano studios, 120 in all. Business is so good that there is a waiting list for potential students, and the company has had to recruit a dozen teachers from Russia. This is not an isolated success story — there are 14 other branches of the Jiang Jie school in Beijing alone.
Lessons are taken extremely seriously, parents sit in and make copious notes, students are expected to practise for three or four hours a day. Shirley Young, a leading Chinese-American businesswoman who has returned to live in Shanghai, explains how rigorous the system is. ‘In the West, the premium is on study being fun, but here it’s about discipline. This is not casual learning — you don’t wing it or charm your way through.’
Lang Lang and Li Yundi, the current darlings of the CD industry, are both products of this intensive approach. They are formidable musicians, although critical opinion is still split as to the emotional depth of their playing. Lang Lang’s parents made huge sacrifices to support his studies, living hundreds of miles apart for many years.
A combination of the one-child policy and new prosperity may help to explain why today’s Chinese parents are so fiercely ambitious on their children’s behalf — but there is another reason. When they were growing up themselves, during the Cultural Revolution, learning the piano was inconceivable. Madame Mao’s ‘Gang of Four’ saw it as the most dangerous of all Western instruments. The instrument was once described as being akin to a coffin — ‘a black box in which the notes rattled around like the bones of the bourgeoisie’.
Few of those I encounter who lived through this terrible period want to discuss it; smiles turn to grimaces, the subject quickly changed with the offer of another cup of tea or a question about concert life in Britain. It’s not surprising really; in just a decade so many lives and careers were ruined. The pianist Fou Ts’ong, for example, was forced to seek exile in London, where he later heard his parents had fatally poisoned themselves rather than face the horrors of the mad regime.
Back in Guangzhou I meet a man who is happy to talk, and over three hours pours out his appalling story. Liu Shih Kun came second in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. China’s musicians were only just beginning to cause a stir internationally, and he returned home to a hero’s welcome, not unlike the ticker-tape parade that greeted that year’s winner, Van Cliburn, when he landed at New York. Less than a decade later, because Mr Liu played Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, he was labelled a ‘counter-revolutionary revisionist’, and sent to clean the lavatories at the Central Conservatory of Music. On one occasion a Red Guard beat him so hard with a belt that his arm was fractured.
Worse was to come. Because he had met President Khrushchev in Moscow, Mr Liu was declared a Soviet spy. His imprisonment was personally ordered by Madame Mao. Arrested on a hot summer’s day, he was taken to Beijing’s Taicheng Prison, wearing nothing but a shirt and thin trousers. For two years he had to live in the same garments, nearly freezing to death during the harsh Chinese winter. Starvation was another threat; all he was fed were cornmeal buns, bowls of brine and rotten vegetables crawling with worms. He ate the worms to keep his protein levels up. For hours every day, Mr Liu was forced to kneel in front of a picture of Chairman Mao and confess to his ‘crimes’. ‘China in that era,’ he tells me, ‘was the craziest, cruellest and most brutal place in the world.’
Liu Shih Kun says he no longer gets much pleasure from playing the piano. Instead he looks to the future, with a group of piano kindergartens he has established in cities across China. Parents vie to get their children a place; they study mathematics and language, there are regular gymnastics classes outside — but the staple is daily piano lessons. Enthusiastic teachers lead four- and five-year-olds who seem hungry to learn. Pictures of Mozart and Beethoven hang on the walls. The only concession to the tender age of these students is the nursery wallpaper, with golden stars and silver moons. Mr Liu admits parents force their children into learning: ‘It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just the natural Chinese way.’ Is he running his schools in the hope of nurturing more young piano stars like Lang Lang? He shakes his head. ‘I’m doing it because I want to make up for the time I lost.’
Petroc Trelawny’s documentary The Red Piano Factory will be broadcast as part of BBC Radio Three’s Focus on China season on Sunday 15 June.