Piano imports and sales in China have dropped dramatically in recent years. Is this related to the “lying flat” phenomenon among young Chinese? Will this undercut China’s ambition to lead in the world of science? Does the decline of classical music in the West correlate to the decline in innovative science in the West?
… New piano sales fell from a pre-Covid peak of 400,000 in 2019 to 200,000 in 2022. China’s imports of pianos—mainly high-end instruments for conservatory and professional use–fell from a 2021 peak of US$272 million to $197 million in 2023. …
… Added to this is a quiet rebellion by young Chinese against the exhausting demands of elite education in China—part of the trend that the Chinese have dubbed “lying flat.” …
… The sudden attrition of classical music studies may have deleterious consequences that China’s education establishment doesn’t foresee, impeding China’s ambition to become a scientific superpower. …
… Not by accident, classical music has been the avocation of Western mathematicians and physicists for centuries. Einstein was an excellent violinist, Heisenberg was a child prodigy whose first career choice was the piano (and sometimes accompanied Einstein), Max Planck played several instruments and composed operas, Werner von Braun was a composition student of Paul Hindemith, Ludwig Boltzmann was a classical pianist who studied with Bruckner, and so forth. …
I have wondered about something like that. In the US, the generation that came of age during the Great Depression of the 1930s were left with a frugal hard-working attitude. When that generation began to back out in the 1960s, the US started to go to hell. The effect was delayed for Germany, where those who came of age in the horrible 1940s had a very strong work ethic. Germany did not start to fall apart until later.
In China’s case, the big social impact was probably the utter misery of Mao’s Great Proletarian Revolution in the 1970s, which left a generation that worked hard because they knew how close to the edge their lives were. Hence China’s current global lead. Now that generation of Chinese are beginning to leave the stage. Younger Chinese were brought up with no personal memories of those hard times and with an expectation that life would effortlessly continue to get better – hence “lie flat”.
If this perspective is anywhere close to correct, the implication is clear – put your money on the Russians to prevail for the next decades or so, because many Russians today came of age in the desperate days of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. No “lying flat” there – at least, not until the following generation becomes pre-eminent.
