Tian Han

Tian Han was a Chinese playwright, translator and poet and a leader of left-wing drama, music and film, counted by drama historians among the three founders of Chinese spoken drama. After studying in Japan from 1916 to 1922, he founded the Southern Society in Shanghai, joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1932 and wrote plays on workers' struggles and resistance to Japan. In 1934 he wrote the lyrics of March of the Volunteers, set to music by Nie Er, which was adopted as the provisional national anthem of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Denounced and jailed in the Cultural Revolution, he died in 1968; he was rehabilitated in 1979, and his words were restored to the anthem in 1982.