Keys to success?

And in the summer of 2014, more than 8,000 young piano learners in Beijing alone signed up for piano level tests offered by CCOM.

However, performing skills are emphasized far more than musical expression, and people blindly push their kids to higher and higher levels of proficiency.

Zhang Boyu, president of CCOM Press and former dean of the musicology department of CCOM, compares piano learning in China to sports training.

"People have overemphasized the skills, overlooking music's cultural value," he says. "Yes, in the very beginning, proficiency tests can encourage or prompt children to learn a musical instrument, but essentially, there is no need to do those tests at all. Music is music."

"It's great that we have some excellent classical pianists such as Lang Lang, Li Yundi and Wang Yujia, who are internationally famous. But they do not represent the general level of musical culture in China," Zhang added.

"Chinese people generally don't know how to appreciate piano music from the West, and they are even less interested in Chinese classical music such as the Kunqu Opera or in learning to play the guqin (a plucked seven-string Chinese musical instrument of the zither family)."

On a chilly Friday evening, the Forbidden City Concert Hall presented Ju Jin, a Chinese-born Italian pianist, but less than one-third of the 1,400 seats were occupied. Some people even fell asleep and a man was reading on his kindle.

However, He Yi, from her professional perspective, said that Ju's performance was brilliant.

Zhang suggests that the big chain of interests that has formed as the result of tests that may have distorted the pleasure of music.