BEIJING -- Looking at his audience, Liao Changyong, a famed globetrotting baritone, was nervous, a feeling he rarely experiences onstage.

"I'm not so accustomed to speaking compared to singing. So I'll try to speak as well as I sing," he said at a group session of the Shanghai delegation to the National People's Congress in March 2014, causing a ripple of laughter to erupt from his fellow deputies.

His nerves soon eased when President Xi Jinping, then a fellow deputy with the Shanghai delegation, said, "We're all deputies here, speak freely."

Reassured, Liao set the scene. "I really hope authorities can give more attention and support to 'The Spring River Flows East,' 'The Family' and 'Sunrise' which we're working on," said Liao, then vice president of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, referring to the original operas the conservatory was producing.

"It's no easy job to put on three operas all at once," Xi chimed in.

"Yes, indeed. The financial pressure is high, too," Liao said, sparking another gale of laughter among the deputies.

Liao said he had a dream that Chinese works created by Chinese people would be in the repertoires of the world's major opera houses.