According to Mencius , a ruler had asked Mencius whether it was moral if he preferred pop songs to the classics. The answer was that the only thing matters being whether or not he loved his subjects.

The Imperial Music Bureau, first established in the Qin Dynasty , was greatly expanded under the Emperor Han Wu Di (140-87 BC) and charged with supervising court music and military music and determining what folk music would be officially recognized. In subsequent dynasties, the development of Chinese music was strongly influenced by foreign music, especially that of Central Asia.

Instrumental music in China is played on solo instruments or in small ensembles of plucked and bowed stringed instruments, flutes, and various cymbals, gongs, and drums. The scale has five notes. Bamboo pipes and qin are among the oldest known musical instruments from China; instruments are traditionally divided into categories based on their material of composition: skin, gourd, bamboo, wood, silk, earth/clay, metal and stone. Chinese orchestras traditionally consist of bowed strings, woodwinds, plucked strings and percussion. The oldest written music is Orchid in Seclusion, attributed to Confucius. The first major well-documented flowering of Chinese music was for the qin during the Tang Dynasty, though the qin is known to have been played since before the Han Dynasty.

  In ancient China the position of musicians was much lower than that of painters. Therefore music theory was not very well developed. But almost every emperor took the folk songs seriously. They sent officers to collect the folk songs for inspecting the popular will. One of the Confucianist Classics, Shi Jing (poets), contained lots of folk songs during 800 BC to about 300 BC.

The New Culture Movement  of the 1910s and 1920s evoked a great deal of lasting interest in Western music as a number of Chinese musicians who had studied abroad returned to perform Western classical music and to compose works of their own based on the Western musical notation system. Symphony orchestras were formed in most major cities and performed to a wide audience in the concert halls and on radio. Many of these performers added jazz influences to traditional music, adding xylophones, saxophones and violins, among other instruments. Lu Wencheng, Li Jinhui, Zhou Xuan, Qui Hechou, Yin Zizhong and He Dasha were among the most popular performers and composers during this period; many, especially Zhou Xuan, were criticized as pornographic and degenerate by Maoists. Popular music--greatly influenced by Western music, especially that of the United States--also gained a wide audience in the 1940s. After the 1942 Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, a large-scale campaign was launched in the Communist controlled areas to adapt folk music to create revolutionary songs to educate the largely illiterate rural population on party goals. Musical forms considered superstitious or anti-revolutionary were repressed, and harmonies and bass lines were added to traditional songs. One example is The East Is Red, a folksong from northern Shanxi which was adapted into a nationalist hymn. Of particular note is the composer, Xian Xinghai (1905-1945), who was active during this period and composed the Yellow River Cantata which is the best-known of all of this works. The contata was adapted to a piano concerto, the Yellow River Concerto, by the pianist Yin Chengzong in 1969, and is still performed today on stages of the world.