Well, China may like Western Music as you say (in Shanghai maybe), but they still always jump at specifically the Chinese pianists - Yundi Li is almost a god there, despite being one of the driest, one of the most generic and boring concert pianists around, who can no longer sell seats in the west. Long Long is not a bad player either, but I want to hear him play Tchaikovsy, not some third rate Chinese composition like the Yellow River Concerto, which is basically a mediocre knockoff of better works, yet is a required piece of any Chinese concert repertoire. The actual act of learning the Piano now is more like this: you are some rich kid in Beijing, whose neighbours all learn how to play the piano at age 4 because their parents bought a book that teaches them how to parent you for Harvard, so you need to learn piano as all harvard graduates are proficient at piano, and therefore your friends parents will not be allowed to play with you unless you know piano too. It is not even about playing well or not well, or making progress, it is about the act of playing the piano itself, showing that you are richer than the kids who cannot play - and you are in a school environment that thrives on its public private nature, where the rich kids always end up somehow in better classes, and with positions of authority over their classes, despite the profession of free education (which ends at the beginning of what they call high school).
My comment on the knockoff was not that I think knocking off is bad, as I am a strong supporter of internet freedom etc, it was that, having something completely isolated allows the Chinese web-user the ability to actually never interact with the Global world on the internet - the one great thing of Facebook is it is international (well, not China tsk tsk, where it is fully blocked). My point was our websites have knockoffs, and then they block the original, ensuring the website that does not move well at all in the West is forever the only website in China.
In this world, the hardest thing anybody will need to learn is how to laugh at themselves. Some countries do a better job than others I would wager, but some countries yell at every insult, and are obsessed with their own image and propaganda. If people want to talk about literature mixing in the world, and cultures being exchanged, first people need to understand that this is a new phenomenon, and has been a failure almost everywhere it was attempted. I am a big fan of the notion that art has no borders, but I am constantly dissuaded and led to believe that art is part of the scheme that creates borders. The comfort zone, as I call it, for culture extends to everything - the British mentality of hop in a carriage and don't stop until arriving in Italy and bipassing everything on the way still rings true to how most places interact culturally - we have an excepted group of tropes, and we just don't bother with the rest. Racine is not translated into English, and not widely available because Racine is not liked by the English, who have never liked French poetics at all, regardless of whether or not they realize that their poetic tradition has felt French influence far more heavily than any other outside force (Chaucer was reading French, which developed earlier, the early Renaissance authors were reading French as well, which developed there before England, and the court of Charles the 2nd were writing in modes taken straight from the French lands they were exiled to, and ironically in the mode if not directly from the classicist Racine).
