Li Jinhui, the pioneer of China opera creation in the 2th century, created 12 children's musical dramas such as Sparrows and Children and Little Painter, which had a great influence in China at that time and set a precedent for China's opera creation. In 1934, Nie Er and Tian Han introduced The Storm in the Yangtze River, and this practice of "drama plus singing" later became a more common form of opera structure. Since the mid-193s, some professional composers in Shanghai and Chongqing have made different explorations in creating national operas, including Xi Shi (Chen Gexin, 1935), Peach Blossom Garden (Chen Tianhe, 1939), Song of Shanghai (Zhang Hao, 1939), Song of the Earth (Qian Renkang, 194) and Song of the Earth. Among these works, Qiu Zi by Huang Yuanluo is the most influential one. In Yan 'an, there are also two works, Rural Music (composed by Xiang Yu, etc.) and Military and Civilian March Music (composed by Xinghai). Soon, based on the Yangko Movement in Yan 'an, the Yangko Opera "Brother and Sister Land Reclamation" (composed by Amber) and "Couple Literacy" (composed by Kyle), which are novel and lively forms of square song and dance, changed the development direction of China opera art and directly gave birth to the large-scale opera "White-haired Girl" (composed by Kyle, etc.). White-haired Girl is a landmark work in the history of Chinese opera, which indicates that China opera has finally found its own unique development path and formed its own distinctive aesthetic character. After The White-Haired Girl, there appeared outstanding plays such as Liu Hulan (composed by Luo Zongxian and others) and Red Leaf River (composed by Liang Lengguang). Later, opera historians called the continuous appearance of outstanding plays such as "Brother and Sister Open up the Land" to "White-haired Girl", "Liu Hulan" and "Red Leaf River" in a short period of time as "the first opera climax".

In the seventeen years since the People's Republic of China was founded, there have been several different ways of creative thinking in China's opera creation: one is to inherit the traditional opera, and the representative plays include Marriage of Young Heirs (composed by Kyle and others), Hongxia (composed by Aring Zhang), Red Coral (composed by Wang Xiren and Hu Shiping) and Dou E Yuan (composed by Chen Zi). One is to create a new type of musical drama with folk musical drama, minor drama or Li's children's musical drama as the reference system, and its representative is Liu Sanjie; One is to take drama and singing as its own structural model, and its representative is Starlight and Starlight (composed by Fu Gengchen and Hu Yi) which appeared after the Cultural Revolution. One is based on the traditional western grand opera, and its representative works include wang gui and li xiangxiang (composed by Liang Lengguang), Song of the Grassland (composed by Luo Zongxian), Wang Fuyun (composed by Zheng Lvcheng) and Ayiguli (composed by Shifu and Usmanjiang). The last one is based on the creative experience of White-Haired Girl, and insists on the content needs as the starting point of all artistic ideas in concepts and techniques. It is neither subject to nor rejected by any one technique. As long as the content needs it, it can also adopt western opera techniques, banqiang techniques or drama singing techniques. There are two masterpieces of this mode of creation-Red Guards of Honghu Lake (composed by Zhang Jingan and Uncle Ouyang Qian) and Jiang Jie (composed by Yang Ming, Jiang Chunyang and Jin Sha), which can prove its outstanding achievements.

In the new era, due to the changes in the living environment of opera and the development of artistic concepts and opera tastes, there is an obvious trend of polarization in opera creation.

One is the trend of elegance, that is, to continue to dig in depth along the direction of serious grand opera, and to take the comprehensive aesthetic feeling of opera at a higher aesthetic level as the main artistic exploration goal. The early achievements of this exploration are "Flower Protector" (Huang Anlun's song) and "Mourning for the Past" (Shi Guangnan's song), followed by "Yuan Ye" (Jinxiang's song), "Flying in the sky" (Xiao Baiqu), "Arirang" (Cui Sanming's song) and "Return to Come" (Xu Zhanhai's song), and after the 199s, there are some more. Yuan Ye, Cangyuan and Zhang Qian can be regarded as the peaks of serious grand opera creation in the new period in terms of their ideological, artistic and comprehensive beauty of opera.

Another trend is secularization, that is, taking American Broadway musicals as a frame of reference, exploring ways to develop our own popular musicals in China. The earliest achievements in this field were Our Modern Youth (Liu Zhenqiu), Romantic Years (Shang Yi Qu) and The Legend of Friendship and Love (Tsui Hark Qu) in the early 198s. Since then, such explorations have been carried out throughout the 198s and 199s, with more than 1 new plays performed in public, but few successful ones.