(by Richard C. Kraus)

《Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music》is written by an American scholar, Richard Curt Kraus. Using piano as a metonym, this book traces how European classical music has fared in China. In his book, Kraus concerns the musicians and development of music in China with sociology theory , and then he mentions his own opinions about the Chinese music. The different academic views and the methods of thinking can make some differences between Westerners and ours .So the describes and analysis on the development of music, and the music in culture revolution and the musicians in China by Kraus are clearly different with the counterparts from ours. Although this book has been published in the end of the last century, it is still known by few people in our country . With translating, studying and doing analysis of this book, this paper is trying to obtain the theory , views as well as something which is improper and need more discusses in it. And it is expected that it would be helpful for the studies about the modern history of Chinese music.