Sweet tune for piano maker: During the tumultuous years of Mao Zedong?s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, few Chinese dared to buy a piano, which symbolised the West's decadent and bourgeois society.
?We didn't have to stop making them but we can't have sold more than a hundred or so a year back then. Learning the piano was frowned upon,? said Tong Zhicheng, a 63-year-old piano maker who is now director-general of Pearl River Piano Co.
How times have changed.
Tong said the state-owned firm, based in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, is now the world's largest piano maker.
