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Abstract
This article examines the complexity of the education of values in the People's Republic of China (PRC) since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). It attempts to provide an insight into how the central state has managed the values of music education with respect to the dynamic changes to its political ideology across these four decades. It explores how the Chinese Communist government uses music to articulate a sense of corporate identity around traditional values and Communist ideology, whilst being responsive to the demands of the contemporary world. The main argument of this article is that the Chinese state is the primary agent of cultural transformation in music education, which, as such, has continued to play a significant role in determining musical knowledge as a sociopolitical disciplining of society. The challenges to values education in China's music education are the interplay between Communist ideology and contemporary values, and that between Communist revolutionary music and other contemporary musical styles.
Notes
Corresponding author. Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. Email: [email protected]
In traditional Chinese society, social classes were ranked in the order: scholars and officials; farmers and peasants; artists, and merchants.
Chou Wen‐Chung was born in Chefoo, China, on 29 June 1923. He went to the USA in 1946 on an architecture scholarship at Yale University but gave up his architecture study to study composition with Nicholas Slonimsky at the New England Conservatory of Music and Columbia University. Chou then taught at Columbia from 1964 to 1991, during which time he won the first Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition prize in 1984. He also founded the Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and served as its director from 1984 to 1991.
Lei Feng (1940–1962) was born in the central Hunan Province and had a miserable childhood before the takeover of the CCP in 1949. To express his love and appreciation of the PRC, he devoted himself to his work in the PLA and spent his spare time and money helping people. In March 1963, Chairman Mao asked the whole nation to learn from Lei Feng who was regarded as the most important symbol of sacrifice for other.
China's coastal areas include five Special Economic Zones including Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Xiamen, Shantou and Hainan, 14 Open Cities bordering the sea, and 36 Economic and Technological Development Regions.
Basically, socialist China ranked three classes in society in the following order: (1) good‐class including revolutionary leaders (cadres), army men, martyrs, pre‐liberation (pre‐revolutionary) industrial workers and their families, former poor and lower‐middle peasant families; (2) middle‐class of non‐intellectual middle‐class such as pedlars and clerks, and former middle‐peasant families, as well as middle‐class intellectuals (teachers, professionals); and (3) bad‐class of former capitalists, pre‐liberation landlords and counter‐revolutionaries (Unger, Citation1982, pp. 13–14).
For more detailed information on the impact of market economics on Chinese education, see Law (Citation1995, Citation2000) and Mok (Citation1997, Citation2003).
Teresa Teng's (1953–1995) enormous popularity in China gave rise to the saying, ‘Deng Xiaopeng rules by day, Teresa Teng rules by night.’ She died from an asthma attack in May 1995 whilst on holiday in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The Teresa Teng Foundation opened Teng's favourite retreat in Stanley, Hong Kong, to the public in May 2000 and pledged to raise funds for charity.
Taiwanese Aboriginal singer Chang Hui‐mei (also known as ‘A‐mei’) was popular in mainland China, where she had her six successful concerts in the summer of 1999, but after singing the national anthem of the Republic of China at President Chen Shui‐bian's 20 May inauguration in 2000, she was banned from the PRC. Before the ban, A‐mei began a world tour with a concert in Shanghai in August 2002.
According to Baranovitch (Citation2003, p. 205), the official pop songs are sung either in a Chinese artistic folk singing style or in western bel canto style. The tempo of the songs is usually set very slow that signifies the stability, solidity and peace of the official post‐revolutionary; whilst the fast and stirring songs of the revolutionary period symbolized the ‘militant revolutionary spirit of that time’ in order to activate people for ‘revolutionary action’.