Abstract
This systematic review synthesizes six years (2019–2025) of scholarly discourse on Chinese national music education in higher education. It employs Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory to diagnose multi-level challenges and strategize pathways for sustainable development, positioning the issue at the intersection of cultural policy, digital transformation, and human development in the Asia-Pacific region. Adhering rigorously to PRISMA 2020 guidelines, a qualitative synthesis was conducted on 64 peer-reviewed studies from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database. The analysis employed a hybrid inductive-deductive approach: open coding allowed themes to emerge from the data, which were then systematically mapped onto Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework—macrosystem (policy/culture), mesosystem (institution), microsystem (pedagogy), and individual level (student)—with attention also to the chronosystem (temporal change). The ecosystem is characterized by policy-practice decoupling, curricular Westernization, a digital divide, and a crisis of cultural confidence. A paradigm shift is evident in post-2020 literature, advocating for digitally-enabled pedagogies (AI, VR), interdisciplinary “New Liberal Arts” fusion, and a transition from cultural inheritance to innovation. The findings underscore the necessity of synergistic, multi-level interventions. External validity concerns, similar to those noted in the broader Chinese educational research landscape, are also discussed. This is the first review to apply a robust ecological framework to this domain, transforming fragmented findings into a coherent diagnostic and strategic model. It explicitly links cultural heritage education to global development agendas and offers evidence-based, scalable policy insights for stakeholders across the Asia-Pacific, contributing to comparative studies on cultural sustainability in education.
Introduction
The preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is increasingly recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other global bodies as a critical dimension of sustainable development, contributing significantly to social cohesion, cultural diversity, and the overall quality of human life (UNESCO, 2003). Within this global context, Chinese national music—encompassing the vast and diverse soundscapes of the nation's 56 ethnic groups—represents a formidable repository of living cultural heritage (Zhang, 2019; Chen, 2022). It is not merely an art form but a sonic archive of history, philosophy, and social values.
Before proceeding, it is essential to clarify what we mean by “Chinese national music.” This term encompasses a vast and internally diverse soundscape. China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups, with Han Chinese comprising approximately 91.5% of the population and 55 minority groups inhabiting frontier regions from Inner Mongolia to Tibet, Xinjiang to Yunnan (SAGE Encyclopedia, 2019). Each group maintains distinct musical traditions—from Han regional opera styles (Peking opera, Cantonese opera, Kunqu) and instrumental genres (guqin, pipa, zheng) to minority traditions such as Uyghur Muqam, Tibetan Buddhist chant, Mongolian long-song, and Miao antiphonal singing. The category also includes hybrid forms that have emerged through centuries of inter-ethnic exchange and, more recently, state-sponsored “composed folk songs” that synthesize traditional elements with Western compositional techniques.
In Chinese academic discourse, “national music” is often used interchangeably with “traditional music” (传统音乐) and “ethnic music” (民族音乐), though subtle distinctions exist. “Traditional music” typically emphasizes historical continuity and connection to pre-modern practices, while “ethnic music” foregrounds the diversity of minority traditions. “National music” carries additional political connotations, particularly in policy contexts, where it is framed as a component of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and a vehicle for constructing unified national identity while simultaneously celebrating multicultural diversity (Chen, 2022; Yang, 2019; Zhang, 2019). As Gibbons (2020) notes in his study of hua’er folksong heritagization, “the ICH process at the national level tends to be a top-down project for the construction of national identity, in which the main goal of ICH recognition and protection is to strengthen a clear Chinese identity and a harmonious society.” This tension—between preservation of diverse local traditions and their incorporation into a unified national narrative—pervades the literature we synthesize. In this review, unless a distinction is explicitly required (e.g., when discussing minority-specific policies or historical continuity), we use “national music” as the overarching term for consistency, while acknowledging that the cited literature may use “traditional” or “ethnic” interchangeably.
Its position within China's rapidly modernizing and expanding higher education system, however, presents a critical paradox. It is ceremonially celebrated as a pillar of national identity and cultural soft power, yet systematically marginalized in pedagogical practice, curriculum design, and substantive policy support (Lei, 2025; Wang, 2023; Zhang, 2020). This tension is exacerbated by the global dominance of Western art music and the pervasive influence of globalized pop cultures, which create a challenging environment for the sustainability of indigenous musical practices worldwide (Schippers, 2009). This tension, therefore, renders Chinese national music education a compelling and critical case study for examining the broader challenges of cultural sustainability, educational decolonization, and identity formation in 21st-century Asia-Pacific societies, many of which grapple with similar post-colonial legacies and modernization pressures.
Our focus on higher education is strategic for three interconnected reasons. First, higher education institutions are the primary site for training the music educators who will teach at all levels—primary, secondary, and community-based. As Shaw (2025) observes in the UK context, “developing students’ music educator identities, confidence and aspiration to teach is sometimes a slow-burn process, which, arguably, should not be left until postgraduate years.” Interventions in higher education thus have multiplier effects throughout the educational ecosystem. Second, universities serve as the primary gatekeepers of curricular legitimacy; what is taught, valued, and certified at the tertiary level shapes what is considered “real” music education at lower levels. Third, higher education is where future cultural policymakers, arts administrators, and cultural leaders are formed. Their understanding of—and commitment to—national music will shape institutional and policy decisions for decades to come.
We acknowledge, however, that this focus inevitably excludes important developments in primary and secondary music education, as well as community-based transmission outside formal schooling. These represent important directions for future research. Moreover, higher education itself must be understood within Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework as a mesosystem that is itself shaped by macrosystem policies and, in turn, shapes microsystem classrooms and individual student development. The challenges documented in higher education—curricular Westernization, teacher shortages, digital divides—often originate in feeder systems; for instance, students arrive at university having already internalized the “Western music center” ideology through K-12 music education that prioritizes Western classical repertoire. A complete ecological analysis would trace these cascading effects across all levels; we hope our review provides a foundation for such multi-level work.
Extant research, as documented in the Chinese academic discourse, consistently highlights a complex, self-reinforcing web of systemic issues. Scholars have long documented the curricular hegemony of Western classical music theory and practice, which systematically sidelines national traditions and frames them as “other” or “supplementary” (Chen & Wang, 2020; Yang, 2019). This is compounded by a critical shortage of teachers with deep, authentic expertise in indigenous music forms and their pedagogical transmission (Feng, 2021; Zhao, 2019), and a pervasive lack of “cultural confidence” (文化自信) among students—a key policy concept referring to a nation’s pride, belief, and trust in the value and relevance of its own culture in the modern world (Bao, 2024; Li, 2020). The most recent scholarship (2024–2025) has begun to engage with new frontiers of challenge and opportunity, particularly the imperatives of digital transformation—Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and big data (Sun, 2025; Xu, 2024)—and the potential of the interdisciplinary “New Liberal Arts” (新文科) initiative to revitalize the curriculum and break down disciplinary silos (Chen, 2024).
The COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022) serves as a critical chronosystem event that fundamentally disrupted and transformed Chinese higher education. Emergency remote teaching forced rapid adoption of digital platforms, accelerating what might otherwise have been a gradual transition to technology-enhanced learning. For national music education, this had paradoxical effects: while performance-based courses suffered from lack of in-person instruction, the crisis also catalyzed experimentation with digital preservation, online master-apprentice relationships, and virtual ensemble projects that continue to shape post-pandemic pedagogy (Sun, 2025; Yu, 2020). The most recent scholarship (2024–2025) explicitly engages with this legacy, particularly the integration of AI and VR technologies that gained traction during pandemic-era experimentation. Thus, “post-pandemic developments” refer not merely to temporal sequence but to a fundamental reorientation of pedagogical possibilities that emerged from crisis conditions.
However, as noted in prior reviews and evident from our initial data extraction, this body of work remains fragmented, often rich in descriptive case studies but lacking a unifying theoretical framework to articulate the systemic nature of these challenges. Furthermore, as highlighted in a broader systematic review of Chinese music education research, there is often a gap between academic discourse and actual social contexts, with studies potentially over-relying on proposed financial and policy solutions without adequately addressing deeper structural and pedagogical issues (Yang & Welch, 2023).
To address this critical gap, this study employs Urie Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological systems theory. This framework is uniquely suited to analyzing the complex, multi-layered, and dynamic interactions between policy, institutions, pedagogy, and individual agency that collectively determine developmental outcomes—an approach widely validated in educational research (Burns et al., 2015). We conceptualize national music education not as a collection of isolated issues, but as a dynamic, nested ecosystem comprising four interconnected levels: (1) The Macrosystem: Overarching national cultural and educational policies, societal values, global cultural flows, and dominant ideologies. (2) The Mesosystem: Institutional structures, including inter-departmental relations, university-wide curriculum design, resource allocation, and administrative support. (3) The Microsystem: The immediate environment of classroom interactions, teaching practices, teacher-student dynamics, and the enacted curriculum. (4) The Individual Level: The developing student, their motivations, artistic identity formation, cultural competence, and sense of belonging. While Bronfenbrenner's original model includes five systems—adding the exosystem (the indirect environment that affects individuals, such as parents’ workplaces or mass media) between mesosystem and macrosystem—our analysis subsumes exosystem influences within the macrosystem and mesosystem levels. This decision reflects the structure of the reviewed literature, which predominantly addresses either broad societal/cultural forces (macrosystem) or direct institutional/pedagogical environments (meso/micro). Mass media, for instance, is discussed primarily as a macrosystem force shaping cultural values, while parental influence appears in discussions of student motivation at the individual level. We acknowledge that future research might productively examine exosystem factors—such as parents’ employment in cultural industries or community media representations—as distinct influences on national music education.
Importantly, our use of Bronfenbrenner's framework follows a hybrid inductive-deductive approach. As detailed in our methods section, we first conducted inductive, open coding of all extracted problems and strategies, allowing themes to emerge directly from the data without theoretical preconception. Only after this inductive phase did we systematically map the emergent themes onto Bronfenbrenner's ecological levels. This approach ensures that the framework organizes—rather than imposes—the findings, revealing systemic interconnections that might otherwise remain implicit. This hybrid methodology follows established practices in qualitative educational research (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008; Liu et al., 2025), combining the grounded authenticity of inductive analysis with the analytical power of established theory.
While our primary analysis is structured around the macrosystem, mesosystem, microsystem, and individual levels, we also acknowledge the importance of Bronfenbrenner's chronosystem—the dimension of time that encompasses changes and continuities in both the individual’s environment and the individual themselves over the life course (Arnold et al., 2012; Bronfenbrenner, 1989). The chronosystem is particularly relevant to this review, as our 2019–2025 window captures significant socio-historical events—including the post-2017 policy emphasis on “cultural confidence”, the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption of educational practices, and the acceleration of digital transformation in higher education—that collectively shape the evolving ecology of national music education. As Chen and Nieminen (2024) note in their ecological review of student emotions, “scholars must take into account the chronosystem level since emotions are dynamic, evolve over time and reflect wider societal changes.” By attending to the chronosystem, we can better understand how the educational ecosystem has shifted from pre-2019 concerns about basic resource scarcity to the post-2020 engagement with digital innovation and interdisciplinary fusion documented in our findings. For a recent comprehensive review of Bronfenbrenner's theoretical evolution and its application in international and intercultural education, see Tong and An (2024), who emphasize the importance of distinguishing between the earlier ecological systems theory (EST) and the later bioecological PPCT model—a distinction we maintain throughout this review.
Applying this framework allows us to move beyond a mere laundry list of problems and towards a coherent diagnostic model that reveals critical leverage points for systemic intervention and change. This review therefore aims to: (1) Systematically identify, synthesize, and quantify the documented problems and proposed strategies in Chinese national music higher education from 2019 to 2025. (2) Map these findings onto Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework to reveal their systemic interdependencies, cascading effects, and potential synergies. (3) Explicitly connect the synthesized findings to wider regional and global debates on cultural sustainability, digital transformation, and human development, drawing out clear, actionable, and evidence-based policy implications for educators, administrators, and policymakers across the Asia-Pacific region.
Literature Review
The scholarly discourse on Chinese national music education is situated within a robust global conversation about cultural preservation, the decolonization of knowledge and curricula, and the complex impact of globalization and digitalization on local artistic practices. Internationally, research has documented similar tensions where non-Western traditional music forms struggle for legitimacy, resources, and pedagogical relevance within formal education systems that are often historically structured around Western classical traditions and aesthetic standards (Burns et al., 2015; Schippers, 2009). The concept of “cultural sustainability” in music education has thus gained traction, emphasizing the urgent need for pedagogical approaches that are both faithful to the integrity of tradition and dynamically, creatively engaged with the present, fostering living traditions rather than museum-style preservation (Schippers & Bartleet, 2013). This often involves navigating the complex, and sometimes contentious, interplay between preservation and innovation, a challenge that is acutely felt in rapidly developing, historically rich societies like China.
Within the specific context of China, the research field has historically been rich in qualitative, practice-oriented analysis and philosophical reflection. Early studies (pre-2019) primarily diagnosed problems of curriculum marginalization, resource scarcity, and a general sense of crisis in transmission (e.g., Li, 2019b). The period from 2019 onwards witnessed a noticeable shift in rhetorical framing, increasingly articulated through the lens of national policy concepts like “cultural confidence” and the “revival of traditional culture.” This policy-driven momentum spurred a significant wave of literature exploring how higher education can and should foster a stronger, more resilient sense of Chinese cultural identity among the youth (e.g., Wang, 2019b; Li, 2019a).
A substantial portion of this discourse is published in journals that occupy a specific niche within China's stratified academic publishing landscape. Chinese journals are formally ranked by multiple evaluation systems, including the SouthWest JiaoTong University (SWJTU) ranking used in this review, the Peking University Core (PKU Core), and the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). Within this hierarchy, “core journals” represent those meeting minimum quality standards for peer review and academic recognition. However, significant variation exists within this category. Journals ranked SWJTU A or A + (equivalent to international Q1/Q2 journals) typically publish more methodologically rigorous, theoretically sophisticated work with broader readership. In contrast, SWJTU C-ranked journals—while still peer-reviewed and meeting basic academic standards—tend to be more specialized, practice-oriented publications that serve as the primary outlet for practitioner-scholars, conservatory faculty, and regional researchers. These journals, including Yellow River of the Song and Journal of the Northern Music, form the “essential backbone of the field's internal conversation” precisely because they are accessible to and widely read by the music educators who implement national music curricula. As Yang and Welch (2023) observe in their systematic review of Chinese music education research, this distribution reflects the field's diverse ecosystem of knowledge production, where theoretical innovation often appears in top-tier journals while practice-based insights and regional case studies find their natural home in specialized publications.
The most recent publications (2024–2025) mark a significant and promising evolution, engaging explicitly with the challenges and opportunities posed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution—specifically digital transformation through AI and VR (Sun, 2025; Xu, 2024)—the promotion of interdisciplinary fusion under the “New Liberal Arts” banner (Bao, 2024; Chen, 2024), and more sophisticated, student-centered critiques of pedagogical practice that call for a fundamental shift from mere “inheritance” to critical “innovation” and “co-creation” (Xiao, 2023).
However, a critical caveat emerges from broader analyses of Chinese educational research. Yang and Welch (2023) identified that a significant portion of empirical studies in Chinese music education are conducted in economically developed regions, potentially limiting the external validity of their findings and recommendations for the vast and diverse Chinese educational landscape. This review synthesizes this evolving, multifaceted body of work while being mindful of such potential biases, providing a structured overview that connects these dispersed studies into a coherent narrative, while uniquely contributing a powerful ecological lens that clarifies the interconnectedness of these issues and provides a blueprint for holistic intervention.
Methods
Design and Search Strategy
This study was conceived and conducted as a systematic literature review in strict accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 statement (Page et al., 2021), ensuring a transparent, reproducible, and methodologically sound process. The literature search was executed in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database in November 2025. The choice of CNKI was deliberate, as it is the largest and most authoritative repository of Chinese scholarly journals, providing unparalleled coverage of the core debates and perspectives within China's academic community on this specific topic. The search utilized a comprehensive and iterative Boolean search string designed to balance sensitivity and specificity: (TI = (‘民族音乐’ OR ‘传统音乐’) AND KY = (‘高等教育’ OR ‘大学’ OR ‘高校’) AND KY = (‘教育’ OR ‘教学’ OR ‘课程’) AND (FT = (‘发展’ OR ‘挑战’ OR ‘策略’ OR ‘政策’). In English translation, this string searched for articles with titles containing (‘national music’ OR ‘traditional music’) AND keywords containing (‘higher education’ OR ‘university’ OR ‘college’) AND keywords containing (‘education’ OR ‘teaching’ OR ‘curriculum’) AND full text containing (‘development’ OR ‘challenges’ OR ‘strategies’ OR ‘policy’).
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
To ensure the relevance and quality of the studies included, the review adhered to the following pre-defined, explicit criteria:
Inclusion Criteria: (1) Publication Period: January 2019 to December 2025. This six-year window captures a complete policy cycle and the emergence of recent trends, including post-pandemic developments. Specifically, 2019 marks the implementation phase of key national education policies following the 19th National Congress of the CPC in 2017, which placed renewed emphasis on “cultural confidence” and the “revival of traditional culture.” As Liu et al. (2025) note in their analysis of Chinese higher education policy evolution, “policy cycles in China typically unfold over 5–7 year periods, allowing for initial implementation, mid-term adjustment, and outcome assessment.” The 2019–2025 window encompasses the full implementation of the Vocational Education Reform Implementation Plan (2019), the Opinions on Promoting High-Quality Development of Modern Vocational Education (2021), and extends to capture scholarly reflections on these policies. Furthermore, this period uniquely captures the educational disruptions and digital acceleration triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022) and the subsequent scholarly engagement with post-pandemic realities, including AI integration and “New Liberal Arts” initiatives, which emerge clearly in the 2024–2025 literature. (2) Context: Focused exclusively on higher education institutions in mainland China. (3) Scope: Addressed national music education from a holistic, systemic, or strategic perspective. (4) Publication type: Peer-reviewed journal articles rated SWJTU (Southwest Jiaotong University, 2025) Level C or above. This quality filter ensures a baseline of academic credibility and peer review.
The SWJTU (Southwest Jiaotong University) Journal Ranking System is one of several widely recognized classification frameworks for Chinese academic journals. Developed by the university's library and updated periodically (most recently in 2025), it categorizes journals into five tiers: A + (top-tier, international standard journals), A (prestigious national journals), B (high-quality specialized journals), C (qualified peer-reviewed journals meeting basic academic standards), and D (emerging or regional publications). SWJTU C rank or above indicates that a journal has passed formal peer-review quality benchmarks and is recognized within China's academic promotion and funding systems. This threshold is commonly used in Chinese systematic reviews to ensure baseline quality while maintaining comprehensive coverage of the field's discourse.
Exclusion criteria: (1) Studies published outside the specified date range. (2) Literature not related to the higher education sector. (3) Studies conducted from a purely technical, non-systemic perspective (e.g., focusing solely on a specific instrumental technique). (4) Articles published in journals below SWJTU C rank, dissertations, conference proceedings, or book reviews to maintain consistency in publication type and quality.
Literature Screening and Data Extraction
The screening process employed a rigorous, three-phase approach as detailed in the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram. First, all 256 identified records were collated, and 20 duplicate records were removed. Second, the titles and abstracts of the remaining 236 records were screened independently by two researchers against the inclusion and exclusion criteria, excluding 132 records. Third, the full texts of the 104 potentially relevant studies were assessed in detail, leading to the exclusion of 40 studies. The 40 full-text exclusions comprised 37 studies that did not meet the SWJTU C-rank threshold upon full-text verification and 3 studies that discussed national music education without presenting specific, extractable problems or strategies. Ultimately, 64 studies met all inclusion criteria. Any disagreements between the researchers were resolved through discussion and consensus. Figure 1 illustrates the three-phase screening process, from initial identification (n = 256) to final inclusion (n = 64), demonstrating the systematic exclusion of records through duplicate removal, title/abstract screening, and full-text assessment.
PRISMA flow diagram of the literature search and screening process.
A standardized, pilot-tested data extraction form was developed in Microsoft Excel. The extracted information included: author(s), publication year, journal name, SWJTU rank, stated problems (verbatim or paraphrased), and proposed strategies (verbatim or paraphrased). Data extraction was performed independently by the same two researchers to enhance reliability.
Data Analysis
A qualitative content analysis approach, guided by the phases outlined by Elo and Kyngäs (2008), was employed. The analysis proceeded in two primary stages. First, the extracted data on problems and strategies were subjected to an inductive, open coding process. This involved a line-by-line analysis to identify recurring themes, concepts, and patterns (e.g., “teacher-centered instruction,” “lack of digital resources,” “calls for interdisciplinary integration,” “student disinterest”). This process ensured that the findings were deeply grounded in the raw data itself. The coding was conducted primarily by the first author, with a second researcher independently coding a 20% sample to ensure consistency. The inter-coder agreement was calculated using Cohen's Kappa, which reached 0.85, indicating a high level of agreement. Discrepancies were discussed until full consensus was reached.
Subsequently, these emergent, data-driven categories were systematically mapped onto the pre-defined, deductive framework of Bronfenbrenner's educational ecosystem theory (Macrosystem, Mesosystem, Microsystem, Individual). This deductive step provided the necessary theoretical structure to transform a collection of fragmented themes into a coherent, multi-level systemic model. To add a quantitative dimension to the qualitative synthesis and indicate the relative prevalence and weight of each theme within the literature, the frequency of each theme, represented by the number of studies (n) contributing to it, was meticulously documented (see Tables 1–3). This hybrid methodological approach—combining inductive thematic analysis with a deductive theoretical framework and simple frequency counts—allowed for a rich, descriptive thematic synthesis that is simultaneously grounded in the data, indicative of thematic significance, and robustly structured for analytical clarity and theoretical contribution.
Distribution of Included Studies by Publication Year.
Journal and Literature Grade Statistics (Selected).
Macrosystem (Government/Societal) Level: Problems and Strategies.
Classification of Study Types
To enhance transparency for readers unfamiliar with the CNKI literature landscape, the 64 included studies were further categorized by research type. Following the classification framework adapted from Yang and Welch (2023), we identified four predominant types based on title, abstract, and, where necessary, full-text review:
Practice-oriented commentaries (n = 43): These studies present pedagogical reflections, curriculum reform proposals, or strategic discussions without systematic empirical data collection. Typical examples include articles with titles such as “The exploration of nationalization of college music education” (Bai, 2019) or “My view on the inheritance of national music in college music education” (Hu, 2020). This category constitutes the largest share (67%), reflecting the field's applied, practitioner-driven nature. Case studies (n = 10)–These studies examine specific institutional implementations, course designs, or regional practices using qualitative methods such as observation, interviews, or document analysis. Examples include the eight-tone sitting-singing course at Xingyi Normal University for Nationalities (Wei, 2022) and the interdisciplinary course “Chinese Ethnic Folk Music and Works Appreciation” (Chen, 2024). Theoretical/conceptual analyses (n = 6): These studies develop philosophical arguments, conceptual frameworks, or theoretical models for national music education, often drawing on cultural studies, ethnomusicology, or educational philosophy. Examples include Bao (2024) on the shift from cultural awareness to cultural confidence, and Xiao (2023) on forging community consciousness through national music education. Policy analyses (n = 5): These studies critically evaluate national or institutional policies, legal frameworks, or funding mechanisms related to intangible cultural heritage and music education. Examples include Zhou and Wang (2022) on research funding patterns and Lei (2025) on policy implementation pathways.
The predominance of practice-oriented commentaries suggests that the scholarly discourse is heavily shaped by front-line educators and practitioners. The smaller proportion of empirical case studies (16%) indicates an opportunity for future methodological diversification, including more rigorous mixed-methods or longitudinal designs.
Results
Descriptive Overview
The final corpus for in-depth qualitative synthesis consisted of 64 articles. Analysis of publication trends reveals a distinct pattern (Table 1). Publication output peaked sharply in 2019 (22 articles) and 2020 (20 articles), likely corresponding to a surge of academic interest driven by heightened national policy emphases on cultural heritage and “cultural confidence.” This was followed by a notable decline in 2021–2023, with annual outputs ranging from 3–6 articles. While this decline may reflect the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on research and publishing cycles, we acknowledge that journal-specific factors—including varying review timelines, editorial backlogs, and special issue schedules—may also contribute to year-to-year fluctuations. Significantly, a slight resurgence is observable in 2024 (4 articles) and 2025 (5 articles), suggesting a new wave of scholarly inquiry engaging with post-pandemic themes. This pattern aligns with what Liu et al. (2025) describe as “punctuated equilibrium” in Chinese educational policy research, where periods of intense publication activity follow major policy announcements, followed by consolidation phases before new thematic clusters emerge. Table 1 presents the annual distribution of the 64 included studies from 2019 to 2025, revealing a peak in 2019–2020 followed by a decline and a slight resurgence in 2024–2025.
The journals contributing to this corpus were varied, offering insight into the academic landscape of this field. The most prolific journals were Yellow River of the Song (n = 17) and Journal of the Northern Music (n = 16), both classified as SWJTU C-ranked. This indicates that the core conversation is happening within specialized, practice-oriented music education journals. However, it is crucial to note that several higher-tier journals also made contributions, including People's Music (SWJTU A+), Literary and Artistic Contention (SWJTU A+), and Sichuan Drama (SWJTU B+), signifying that the topic of national music education is gaining recognition as a serious issue of broader artistic, cultural, and educational significance beyond the immediate music education community. The solitary appearance of a relevant article in Chemical Industry and Engineering Progress, an EI-indexed journal, highlights the nascent potential for truly transdisciplinary dialogue. Table 2 provides an overview of the journals contributing to this corpus, including their SWJTU ranks and publication frequencies, highlighting the predominance of specialized music education journals (Yellow River of the Song and Journal of the Northern Music).
A key observation, gleaned from a close reading of the most recent literature (2024–2025), is a demonstrable and significant shift in thematic focus. These studies show a marked move beyond diagnosing long-standing, fundamental resource and status gaps towards proactively engaging with contemporary imperatives. There is a clear pivot to discussing the integration of advanced digital technology (AI, VR) as pedagogical tools (Sun, 2025; Xu, 2024), the strategic pursuit of interdisciplinary fusion under the “New Liberal Arts” banner to add depth and relevance (Bao, 2024; Chen, 2024), and a deeper, more nuanced psychological exploration of “cultural confidence” not as a slogan, but as a tangible, desired outcome of the educational process itself. This trend suggests that the field is maturing, beginning to respond to broader societal and technological shifts, and moving from a defensive stance of preservation to a more proactive and adaptive stance of innovation and revitalization.
Synthesis of Problems and Strategies Across the Ecosystem
The findings from the in-depth analysis of the 64 articles are synthesized in Tables 3–5, organized by Bronfenbrenner's four ecological levels. Table 3 focuses on the macrosystem (government/societal level), Table 4 on the mesosystem (university/institutional level), and Table 5 on the microsystem (teacher/classroom) and individual (student) levels. Each cell presents a synthesized theme, with the number of studies supporting it (n) indicating its prevalence within the sampled literature. Table 3 summarizes macrosystem-level problems and proposed strategies, with policy marginalization (n = 45) and the “Western music center” ideology (n = 28) as the most frequently cited challenges.
Mesosystem (University/Institutional) Level: Problems and Strategies.
Microsystem (Teacher/Classroom) and Individual (Student) Level: Problems and Strategies.
Analysis of Macrosystem Findings: The near-universal consensus (n = 45) on policy marginalization underscores a fundamental and critical misalignment between celebratory national rhetoric and the on-the-ground educational reality. The identified “Western music center” ideology (n = 28) refers to the systematic privileging of Western classical music theory, aesthetics, and pedagogical frameworks as the normative standard against which all music—including Chinese national traditions—is evaluated. As Schippers (2009) documents in Facing the Music, this phenomenon is not unique to China but reflects a global colonial legacy in music education where non-Western traditions are positioned as “other” or “supplementary” to the Western canon. In the Chinese context, this ideology manifests through curricula organized around Western music theory (harmony, counterpoint, orchestration), assessment systems derived from Western conservatory models, and implicit aesthetic hierarchies that frame Chinese traditional music as “folk,” “primitive,” or requiring “scientific” systematization through Western analytical frameworks (Chen & Wang, 2020; Yang, 2019). This ideology operates at the macrosystem level, shaping policy priorities, resource allocation, and even the self-perception of Chinese musicians and educators. Proposed strategies are predominantly state-centric, reflecting a widely held understanding that meaningful, large-scale change at this level requires decisive top-down legitimization, strategic direction, and substantial resource allocation, primarily through embedding national music into the powerful, mobilizing narrative of “cultural confidence.” Table 4 presents mesosystem-level problems and strategies, highlighting curriculum fragmentation (n = 64) and digital infrastructure deficits (n = 31) as key institutional barriers.
Analysis of Mesosystem Findings: The universality of curriculum problems (n = 64) points to a core institutional failure. Universities, as the critical mesosystem, are often caught between ambiguous macro-level pressures and unmet micro-level needs, resulting in a default position of a fragmented, elective-based approach that fails to systematize or prioritize national music education. The strong and growing emphasis on digital infrastructure investment (n = 25) in proposed strategies, particularly prominent in recent years, marks a critical awareness that mesosystem resources must evolve beyond traditional textbooks and instruments to include the digital tools and platforms now essential for effective modern pedagogy, cultural preservation, and student engagement. Table 5 covers microsystem (teacher) and individual (student) levels, where teacher capacity issues (n = 55) and student motivation deficits (n = 51) are the most prevalent themes.
Analysis of Microsystem and Individual Findings: The extremely high frequency of teacher capacity issues (n = 55) and student motivation problems (n = 51) reveals the direct human cost and the ultimate manifestation of the macro- and meso-systemic failures. The microsystem (the classroom) is the crucial interface where all upstream problems crystallize into educational outcomes. The prevalence of outdated teaching methods (n = 48) suggests a significant and urgent gap in teacher professional development and institutional support for pedagogical innovation. Strategies at this level are notably more student-centered and pedagogical, focusing on fundamentally transforming the learning experience through technology, interaction, and personal connection to foster the deeply internalized “cultural confidence” desired at the individual level.
Discussion
This systematic review synthesizes six years of concentrated scholarly discourse, revealing an educational ecosystem under significant and multifaceted stress, but also one that is demonstrating clear signs of evolving, innovative, and increasingly sophisticated responses. Our findings resonate with Yang & Welch's (2023) observation of a “research-practice gap” in Chinese music education, but extend it by revealing the multi-level ecological mechanisms that underlie and perpetuate this gap. The integration of the latest 2024–2025 literature brings into sharp focus the new frontiers of challenge and opportunity, effectively moving the conversation from concerns about basic institutional survival to strategies for adaptive innovation and sustainable growth in a changing world.
The Evolving Ecological Crisis: From Resource Scarcity to Digital and Conceptual Gaps
The persistence and high frequency of problems across all systemic levels, from macro to individual, indicate a deeply entrenched, self-reinforcing issue. The analysis vividly illustrates a classic ecological cascade: the macrosystem's failure to decisively prioritize national music in concrete terms (e.g., funding, policy mandates, research priority) (Lei, 2025) creates a resource-scarce and low-prestige environment for universities (mesosystem), which in turn limits the professional development opportunities, curbs the pedagogical innovation, and dampens the morale of teachers (microsystem). This cascade effect ultimately and inevitably manifests in student disengagement, weak cultural identification, and a crisis of confidence at the individual level.
A critical new dimension identified in the most recent research is the evolving nature of this scarcity. While earlier studies (pre-2021) predominantly noted a general lack of resources (classrooms, instruments, basic textbooks), contemporary scholars (Sun, 2025; Xu, 2024) are highlighting a specific, critical, and urgent deficit in digital resources and the corresponding pedagogical knowledge required to use them effectively. This “digital divide” within the arts and humanities risks rendering national music increasingly irrelevant and inaccessible in an increasingly technologically-mediated and digitally-native world, thereby creating a new, potent layer of exclusion for younger generations. Furthermore, the sophisticated work of scholars like Bao (2024) reframes the problem at the individual level not just as a simple lack of interest, but as a profound deficit in “cultural confidence”, a psychological and affective barrier deeply rooted in the lingering, internalized effects of the “Western music center” ideology prevalent in the macrosystem. This reframing elevates the challenge from one of simple curriculum design to one of identity formation and psychological decolonization.
From a chronosystem perspective, the 2019–2025 period reveals a marked evolution in how these challenges are conceptualized. Pre-2020 literature framed problems primarily in terms of resource insufficiency and institutional neglect. By 2023–2025, the discourse had shifted toward engagement with digital transformation, interdisciplinary integration, and the cultivation of cultural confidence as an explicit educational outcome. This temporal shift reflects not only technological advancement but also a maturation of scholarly thinking about what national music education can and should achieve in contemporary China. As Tong and An (2024) argue in their review of Bronfenbrenner's theory in intercultural contexts, the bioecological model's emphasis on proximal processes and person-context interactions offers a more nuanced understanding of developmental outcomes than static environmental descriptions. This insight reinforces our cascading-effects analysis: the microsystem's pedagogical failures cannot be fully understood without tracing their macrosystem and mesosystem origins.
Furthermore, the persistent policy-practice decoupling we identify can be understood through the lens of what van Baalen et al. (2021) term “institutional isomorphism” in higher education. In the global competition for rankings and prestige, universities worldwide often converge towards similar priorities, overwhelmingly favoring STEM fields and quantifiable outputs. This creates inherent structural barriers for cultural subjects like national music, which are perceived as lacking immediate economic utility, despite existing policy rhetoric that celebrates their value.
Emergent and Integrated Solution Pathways: Three Synergistic Strategies
Technology as a Bridge to Tradition, not a Replacement: The call for AI, VR, and digital platforms (Sun, 2025; Xu, 2024) is most compelling and pedagogically sound when framed not as a technological gimmick or a replacement for master-apprentice relationships, but as a vital bridge to tradition. For example, Xu's (2024) case study of VR implementation at a vocational college in Zhejiang Province demonstrates how students used immersive headsets to “visit” remote Miao ethnic villages, observing festival rituals and learning directly from aging tradition-bearers who could no longer travel. Student reflective journals documented not only technical learning but profound emotional connections—one student wrote, “I felt I was truly there, hearing the silver ornaments sway as they danced. This wasn’t learning about music; it was experiencing a living culture.” Using VR for immersive “field trips” to remote folk ceremonies or interactive master classes with aging tradition-bearers can directly overcome the geographical, logistical, and temporal barriers to experiential learning noted consistently in the literature (Bao, 2024), making intangible culture vividly tangible and accessible to the digital native generation.
Interdisciplinarity as a Catalyst for Depth and Relevance: The strong push for “New Liberal Arts” integration (Chen, 2024) directly and effectively addresses the long-standing problem of shallow, decontextualized, and purely performance-oriented content. Similarly, Chen's (2024) interdisciplinary course “Chinese Ethnic Folk Music and Works Appreciation” at a comprehensive university in Guangzhou integrated music analysis with historical texts, ethnographic films, and sociological readings on migration patterns. Assessment required students to produce multimedia projects tracing how specific Hakka mountain songs transformed as Hakka communities migrated across Southeast Asia. Student evaluations revealed that 89% reported “significantly enhanced” understanding of music’s relationship to social history, compared to 34% in traditional performance-only sections. By consciously and systematically connecting music to history, ethnomusicology, literature, cultural geography, ecology, and sociology, educators can strategically shift the focus from narrow technical skill acquisition to a broader, more enriching cultural, historical, and critical understanding. This enhances the intellectual rigor, academic credibility, and perceived value of national music studies, moving it from the periphery of a performance elective to a core component of a holistic, modern humanities education.
From Passive Inheritance to Active Cultural Confidence: The conceptual evolution from “inheritance” to “cultural confidence” (Bao, 2024) is perhaps the most significant and profound shift identified in the recent literature. It reframes the ultimate goal of education from passive preservation and replication of a static canon to the active, proud, and critical re-imagination and innovation of tradition for a contemporary context. This involves creating pedagogical spaces—“communities of practice”—where students are encouraged and empowered not just to replicate notes, but to analyze, critique, and create new works that thoughtfully reimagine tradition (Wang, 2019a). This positions students not as mere recipients or museum curators of a frozen heritage, but as living, contributing participants in its ongoing evolution, thereby fostering the deep, intrinsic motivation and sense of ownership identified as key to sustained engagement (van Baalen et al., 2021).
However, the success of these strategies is contingent upon several unexamined assumptions in the literature. First, the enthusiasm for AI and VR integration (Sun, 2025; Xu, 2024) often assumes that technological access is equitably distributed—an assumption challenged by our finding of persistent digital infrastructure deficits (n = 31). Without accompanying investment in hardware, training, and technical support, digital solutions risk exacerbating inequalities between elite and regional institutions. Second, the push for interdisciplinary “New Liberal Arts” curricula (Chen, 2024) implicitly assumes that faculty possess the training and institutional support to design and deliver such courses. Our finding of widespread teacher capacity issues (n = 55) suggests this assumption may be optimistic. As one study noted, “faculty trained in conservatory models often feel ill-equipped to teach courses connecting music to history, sociology, or cultural studies” (Bao, 2024, p. 75). Third, the shift from “inheritance” to “cultural confidence” discourse (Bao, 2024) raises philosophical questions unaddressed in the reviewed literature: What is being conserved when tradition is reimagined for contemporary relevance? Who has authority to define “authentic” innovation versus inappropriate dilution? These questions merit attention in future research.
Implications for Policy and Regional Development
For meaningful and lasting progress, isolated, piecemeal interventions will remain insufficient. We propose an integrated, ecologically-informed policy framework that acts on multiple levels simultaneously:
Macro-Level (National/Regional): The government should move beyond rhetoric to launch a targeted, well-funded “National Music Digitalization and Innovation Fund.” This fund should support not just the digital archiving of endangered traditions, but also the competitive development of modern, interdisciplinary curricula, and the creation of large-scale, high-quality teacher training programs focused on digital pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, and the facilitator model.
Meso-Level (Institutional): Universities must be actively incentivized through accreditation requirements and performance metrics to break down disciplinary silos. This can be achieved by creating joint faculty appointments, funding cross-listed courses, and establishing innovation grants that foster the interdisciplinary collaboration called for by the literature. Resource allocation formulas must explicitly and consistently prioritize digital infrastructure and technical support for the arts and humanities.
Micro-Level (Practice): Teacher professional development must be systematically overhauled. This should include mandatory, ongoing training in culturally responsive pedagogy, digital tool integration, and specific strategies for fostering student creativity, critical thinking, and positive cultural identity. Performance reviews, promotion criteria, and teaching awards should be reformed to recognize and reward innovation, curriculum development, and success in these key areas.
From our authorial perspective, we would add that the ecological model itself reveals why piecemeal interventions consistently fail. The literature’s emphasis on top-down policy solutions (n = 38) reflects a deeply embedded assumption in Chinese educational discourse that macrosystem change inevitably cascades downward. Yet our analysis suggests this assumption may be incomplete. The persistence of classroom-level transmission models (n = 48) despite decades of policy rhetoric suggests that microsystem change requires not just policy mandates but transformed teacher identities, professional development systems, and institutional reward structures. As one teacher quoted in Feng (2021) observed, “I know the policy says we should teach national music creatively. But my evaluation depends on student performance in Western-style exams, and I have no training in creative methods. So I teach as I was taught.” This gap between policy intent and classroom reality—between rhetoric and practice—is precisely the phenomenon our review seeks to illuminate.
A Model for the Asia-Pacific Region and a Critical Caveat
The Chinese case, with its robust internal scholarly discourse, clear ecological tensions, and scale, offers a valuable, nuanced model for the wider Asia-Pacific region. Countries from Japan and Korea to Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines grapple with strikingly similar challenges in balancing the education of traditional arts with the demands of economic modernization, globalization, and national identity formation, making this systematic analysis highly relevant for the region's cultural and educational stakeholders. The ecological framework itself provides a versatile and portable analytical tool for diagnosing similar systemic blockages elsewhere.
However, a critical caveat must be noted. The Chinese context is unique in the potent combination of a strong, top-down nature of its policy implementation and the sheer, massive scale of its higher education system. While the ecological diagnosis of interconnected challenges is widely applicable across different political contexts, the specific implementation strategies—particularly those deeply intertwined with national ideological campaigns like “cultural confidence”—may require significant adaptation, contextual sensitivity, and a more grassroots, community-driven approach to be effective and appropriate in other Asia-Pacific democracies with different governance structures. Future comparative research, perhaps using this ecological model as a baseline, is essential to test, refine, and adapt the portability of these solutions.
Conclusion, Limitations, and Future Research
This systematic review has provided a comprehensive, ecologically-structured analysis of the Chinese national music education landscape from 2019 to 2025. The key contribution of applying Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory is its capacity to reveal how problems at one level—such as macrosystem policy ambivalence—cascade through mesosystem resource constraints to produce microsystem pedagogical failures and, ultimately, individual student disengagement. This diagnostic insight, which would remain hidden in a non-ecological, fragmented review, demonstrates that isolated, piecemeal interventions are unlikely to succeed; rather, simultaneous, multi-level strategies are required. For a full analysis of the persistent policy-practice decoupling that underlies these challenges, see “Introduction” and “Discussion.” It demonstrates convincingly that while the challenges are systemic, persistent, and deeply rooted, the proposed solutions within the academic discourse are evolving in remarkable sophistication, increasingly embracing the transformative potential of digital technology, the intellectual richness of interdisciplinarity, and the foundational goal of cultivating genuine, deep-seated cultural confidence (see “Emergent and Integrated Solution Pathways: Three Synergistic Strategies” for a detailed discussion of this concept). The path forward, as illuminated by this review, is not simply to do more of the same, but to act more intelligently, more systemically, and in a more integrated fashion across all levels of the educational ecosystem. The findings robustly underscore that the sustainable development of this priceless cultural heritage requires the conscious construction of a self-reinforcing, resilient ecosystem where supportive and coherent macro-policies, empowered and adaptive meso-institutions, innovative and well-supported micro-level teachers, and actively engaged individual students are all aligned in the common, vital purpose of cherishing, critically reimagining, and dynamically revitalizing Chinese national music for the 21st century and beyond.
Limitations Regarding Literature Quality and Representativeness
We acknowledge that a significant portion of our included studies (33 of 64) originate from two specialized, lower-tier journals—Yellow River of the Song (n = 17) and Journal of the Northern Music (n = 16). We share the concern that individual articles within this corpus may exhibit variable quality, including limited length, repetitive themes, and uneven methodological rigor. However, we maintain that inclusion of these journals was methodologically necessary for three reasons.
First, as documented in Table 2, these journals constitute the primary publication outlets for practice-oriented scholarship on national music education in China. Excluding them would omit what we term “the backbone of the field's internal conversation”—the discourse actually read by and shaping the practices of music educators in universities and conservatories across China. A systematic review that excluded these voices would present a distorted picture of the field, capturing only elite theoretical discourse while missing the on-the-ground challenges and strategies that define actual educational practice.
Second, our synthesis does not rely on any single low-quality article as evidence for claims. The themes reported in Tables 3–5 achieve their frequency counts through aggregation across multiple studies. For instance, the “curriculum problems” theme (n = 64) represents universal consensus across all included studies, including higher-tier journals. Critically, the emergent themes we highlight as most significant—digital transformation (Sun, 2025; Xu, 2024), New Liberal Arts integration (Bao, 2024; Chen, 2024), and cultural confidence as psychological outcome (Bao, 2024)—are predominantly drawn from recent publications in higher-tier journals (People's Music, SWJTU A+; Art Research, SWJTU A), providing confidence that these represent genuine scholarly innovation rather than artifacts of lower-tier publication patterns.
Third, our approach follows established practice in systematic reviews of Chinese educational research. Yang and Welch (2023), in their comprehensive review of Chinese music education studies (2007–2019), similarly included a wide range of journal tiers while explicitly discussing quality variation as a limitation. They argue that “excluding lower-tier journals risks privileging international visibility over domestic relevance, and theoretical sophistication over practice-based insight.” We have endeavored to balance these competing priorities.
Nevertheless, we acknowledge that future research should employ additional quality filters, such as prioritizing studies with explicit methodological descriptions, empirical data, or citation impact metrics. We have added this as a recommendation for future reviews.
Additional Limitations and Future Research Directions
Despite its contributions, this study has several additional limitations that also point to directions for future research. First, the exclusive reliance on the CNKI database, while justified for capturing the domestic discourse, inherently limits the international and comparative perspective. Future reviews could incorporate searches in Scopus, Web of Science, or specialized databases like RILM to juxtapose Chinese and international discourses. Second, the quality filter, though necessary, means that the reviewed literature is heavily concentrated in specialized music journals (SWJTU C rank), which may have constrained the methodological and theoretical diversity of the findings. The near-total absence of quantitative or mixed-methods studies in the corpus itself is a notable limitation of the research field in China that future primary research should address. Third, as a systematic review, it synthesizes reported strategies but cannot empirically test their efficacy. Future research should employ primary methods—case studies, experimental designs, longitudinal surveys—to evaluate the impact of the proposed digital, interdisciplinary, and confidence-building interventions. Fourth, as noted, the portability of the specific policy recommendations needs to be tested through rigorous comparative studies across different cultural and political contexts in the Asia-Pacific region. Finally, our focus on higher education, while strategic, excludes important developments in primary, secondary, and community-based music education. Future research should examine how challenges cascade across educational levels and how interventions at one level might generate ripple effects throughout the broader ecosystem.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors confirm that this manuscript has been submitted directly by the corresponding author without any third-party editorial assistance or paid support. All authors have reviewed and approved the final version of the manuscript, its submission to Music & Science, and all statements contained herein, including author contributions, competing interests, and funding disclosures.
We sincerely thank the researchers who have made their work and resources available in open-access formats. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their detailed assessment and valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Our thanks further extend to the editorial team and all staff at Music & Science for their support in publishing this research.
Ethics Statement
This research did not require ethics committee or institutional review board approval. This research did not involve the use of personal data, fieldwork, or experiments involving human or animal participants, or work with children, vulnerable individuals, or clinical populations.
Data Availability Statement
This research is a systematic literature review. No new data were collected or analysed. All data sources are cited in the reference list.
Author Contributions
Yilong Jiang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Project administration.
Anne Noor Sri Juwaneeta Binti Jamaludin: Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing.
Li Huan Tan: Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Supervision, Writing – review & editing.
Lei Pan: Investigation, Resources, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.