China, the violin prodigy

FOR more than 10 years, Wu Hong Fang’s days have been filled with the same gentle sound, the quick chafe of sandpaper on spruce and maple. Working briskly, methodically, her hands a dusty blur, she sands violins all day, six days a week.

There is a rhythm to what she does, but you wouldn’t call it music. Wu laughs when she’s asked whether she feels any connection to the melodies these violins will one day produce.

“Basically,” she says, “it’s a living.”

Wu earns about $100 a month working for Taixing Fengling Musical Instrument Co., the largest violin maker in the world. Its low-slung, low-tech factory sprawls over the center of this once-sleepy farm town in southeastern China.

The people of Xiqiao once grew cabbage, rice and other crops. Today the town of 35,000 is home to about 40 violin companies, giving it a credible claim to being the violin capital of the world.

In the last decade, Chinese companies such as Fengling have transformed the world of stringed instrument manufacturing, which for centuries had been dominated by tradition-steeped craft workers in a few cities in Italy, France and Germany.

As they have done in countless other industries, Chinese companies have crushed the competition with a combination of cheap labor and rapidly evolving skill. The overwhelming majority of the world’s student-level violins, violas, cellos and string basses are being made, in whole or in part, in China.

“The combination of high quality and low price in Chinese-made instruments puts everything else to shame,” said Christopher Germain, a Philadelphia violin maker who is president of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. “The quality has improved exponentially.”

Eric Benning, a third-generation violin maker who owns Studio City Music in Studio City, called the instruments from China “incredible.”

“They’re just gorgeous instruments for the price,” he said.

That price is almost unbelievably low. Using an assembly-line process and skilled craft workers who are lucky to earn 50 cents an hour, Fengling is able to turn out violins that it can sell for less than $25, with bow and case.

The Chinese haven’t yet conquered the market for fine instruments, the kind used by professionals and serious amateurs. But that, too, may just be a matter of time. Last year’s gold medal for violin making at the prestigious Violin Society of America competition, which attracts fine luthiers from all over the world, went to Zhu Ming-Jiang of Beijing.

ON the one hand, the story of China’s rise to dominance in the stringed instrument business is not so different from that of other industries -- toys, clothing, washing machines, furniture, TVs, rebar, you name it.

And yet, a violin is not a washing machine. At its most superlative end, a Stradivarius or Guarnerius represents the pinnacle of European craft and culture, each instrument seemingly perfect, yet idiosyncratic, unique. Even the humble violins played in student orchestras reflect no small amount of craftsmanship, with their thin, curving bodies and delicately carved scrolls.

In fact, though, musical instruments are “something that developing economies have really seized on,” said Brian Majeski, editor of Music Trades magazine, a New Jersey-based publication. Unlike many other products, he said, instruments require little if any research and development. The violins built today are scarcely different from those made 300 years ago. All a competent craftsman has to do is copy.

Before China entered the market, Majeski said, Japan and then South Korea had been major producers. “If you have human energy, human capital, you can do it,” he said. “China’s playing out exactly like Korea and Japan.”

The emergence of a robust musical instrument industry in China is, in fact, a legacy of Mao Tse-tung and his Cultural Revolution -- two powerful forces generally seen as antagonistic to Western culture, to put it mildly. But far from seeing the violin as a decadent tool of the bourgeois West, Mao saw it as an instrument of the revolution, said Zheng Quan, director of the Violin Craft Research Institute in Beijing.

“Mao Tse-tung said we have two

armies: one is with a gun, and one is with this,” he said, raising his arms

as if to play a violin.

Zheng is a warm and worldly man whose office is filled with the showpiece violins of his best students. Fluent in Italian and English, with a love for Italian food, he is one of China’s best violin makers, and a central force in raising the quality of Chinese instruments.

In addition to training young violin makers at his institute, which is part of the Central Conservatory of Music, he is president of the Chinese Violin Makers Assn. and dabbles in scientific quests, such as figuring out why violins sound better as they age (it has to do with the moisture absorption qualities of the wood, he believes) and how to artificially reproduce the aging process (in a word: silicone).

He also is a consultant to Taixing Fengling Co., and has helped it elevate the quality of its instruments.

Zheng explained that when Mao closed Chinese universities during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, some students took up violin making -- and playing -- as a fallback. As many as 60 violin factories began operating in Shanghai alone.

In the 1970s, as the Cultural Revolution wound down and students began returning to universities, Zheng said, demand for violins in China collapsed.

“So in that moment, the small factories closed down. The bigger factories in Shanghai and Beijing began to export the violins.”

AT that point, the Chinese were forced to confront the reality that, by world standards, their violins were junk.

“The brand name ‘Skylark’ comes to mind,” said Germain, the Philadelphia violin maker, referring to a Chinese violin that had a less-than-virtuosic reputation. “They were awful -- terribly made, poor materials, impossible to play. That company is probably responsible for legions of students who gave up on playing the violin.”

To bring up the quality of its instruments, China began sending its violin makers abroad to study under master craftsmen -- first in Germany and then, in 1983, in Cremona, Italy, where Zheng was sent to learn from the world’s best.

The Fengling factory fits neatly into the larger history of Chinese violins. What sets it apart are the outsize ambitions of its current owner, Li Shu.

Li grew up dirt poor in a farming family not far from where his factory sits today, within the Taixing city area of Jiangsu province. In 1971, after graduating from high school, he joined the Fengling assembly line, eventually rising into managerial roles. In 1980, with the violin industry in flux, the government reorganized the factory and made the hard-charging Li its director.

In 2001, he bought the company from the local government. Last year, the factory made 300,000 violins, violas, cellos and basses and 400,000 guitars, and hit a sales record of $25 million.

Li says his factory accounts for 45% of China’s violin production, and as much as a quarter of the world supply.

Majeski, who tracks such data, said Li’s claim is plausible. “That’s not a crazy number,” he said.

Fengling employs 1,280 people, the vast majority of whom work on the assembly line. By Western standards, it is an austere environment. The factory is divided into shops, none much larger than a basketball court. In each, workers concentrate on a single task: sanding violins, chiseling out the front and back, carving scrolls, placing the bridge on the instrument, and so forth.

No parts are made by machine. With the low cost of labor in China, there is little point to labor-saving devices.

Wages, by Li’s account, average $125 a month, or about $1,500 a year. Though very low by international standards, it is decent for rural China.

“China is poor,” said Zheng, the violin institute director. “Everything is cheaper. With this money, they can eat well and pass their lives well.”

And, of course, they can allow their company to produce violins for a pittance compared with Western European or American companies.

“They’ve essentially put the Germans and the French out of business at the lower price range,” said Benning, the Studio City violin maker. Mittenwald, Germany, he said, “used to be this town that was just this great mecca of violin making and case making. Now they’ve essentially sold all their businesses off to Chinese companies, and it’s just a tourist town.”

It is not always possible to know whether an instrument was made in China. Those in the industry said it was increasingly common to sell instruments under labels that give no indication of their provenance. In some cases, industry officials say, companies outside China will add a few finishing touches to the instrument and sell it as if they had produced it.

Li said Fengling violins are sold under a number of labels by other companies, but declined to name them.

Zheng said he has respect and sympathy for the European instrument makers who are confronting a challenge from China, as they did from Japan and South Korea. But, he said, “their problem is, they believe the world won’t change, that they don’t need to change their traditions. That they will just continue forever.... But in China, we understand that nothing lasts forever.”

mitchell.landsberg@

latimes.com