In the 1970s, as the Cultural Revolution wound down and students began returning to universities, Zheng said, demand for violins in China collapsed. As many as 60 violin factories began operating in Shanghai alone. Zheng explained that when Mao closed Chinese universities during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, some students took up violin making - and playing - as a fallback. He also is a consultant to Taixing Fengling Co., and has helped it elevate the quality of its instruments.
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and dabbles in scientific quests, such as figuring out why violins sound better as they age (it has to do with the moisture absorption qualities of the wood, he believes) and how to artificially reproduce the aging process (in a word: silicone). In addition to training young violin makers at his institute, which is part of the Central Conservatory of Music, he is president of the Chinese Violin Makers Assn. Fluent in Italian and English, with a love for Italian food, he is one of China’s best violin makers, and a central force in raising the quality of Chinese instruments. Zheng is a warm and worldly man whose office is filled with the showpiece violins of his best students.
But far from seeing the violin as a decadent tool of the bourgeois West, Mao saw it as an instrument of the revolution, said Zheng Quan, director of the Violin Craft Research Institute in Beijing.Īrmies: one is with a gun, and one is with this,” he said, raising his arms The emergence of a robust musical instrument industry in China is, in fact, a legacy of Mao Tse-tung and his Cultural Revolution - two powerful forces generally seen as antagonistic to Western culture, to put it mildly. “China’s playing out exactly like Korea and Japan.” “If you have human energy, human capital, you can do it,” he said. All a competent craftsman has to do is copy.īefore China entered the market, Majeski said, Japan and then South Korea had been major producers. The violins built today are scarcely different from those made 300 years ago. Unlike many other products, he said, instruments require little if any research and development.
In fact, though, musical instruments are “something that developing economies have really seized on,” said Brian Majeski, editor of Music Trades magazine, a New Jersey-based publication.
Even the humble violins played in student orchestras reflect no small amount of craftsmanship, with their thin, curving bodies and delicately carved scrolls. At its most superlative end, a Stradivarius or Guarnerius represents the pinnacle of European craft and culture, each instrument seemingly perfect, yet idiosyncratic, unique. ON the one hand, the story of China’s rise to dominance in the stringed instrument business is not so different from that of other industries - toys, clothing, washing machines, furniture, TVs, rebar, you name it.Īnd yet, a violin is not a washing machine. Last year’s gold medal for violin making at the prestigious Violin Society of America competition, which attracts fine luthiers from all over the world, went to Zhu Ming-Jiang of Beijing.
But that, too, may just be a matter of time. The Chinese haven’t yet conquered the market for fine instruments, the kind used by professionals and serious amateurs.
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