March of the Volunteers

The story

The "March of the Volunteers" is the national anthem of the People's Republic of China, and unlike earlier Chinese state anthems it is written wholly in vernacular rather than Classical Chinese. It came out of the wave of nationalist art and writing that followed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The communist playwright Tian Han wrote its words in 1934 as two stanzas of a poem, "The Great Wall", for a play; they were taken into the climax of the Diantong Company's film Children of Troubled Times. Tian was then arrested by the Nationalists in Shanghai and held in Nanjing (the story that he wrote it in jail on cigarette paper is a later legend). In March and April 1935, in Japan, Nie Er set the words to music, and the film's sound director, He Luting, had the Russian composer Aaron Avshalomov arrange the orchestral accompaniment. The song closes the film, which tells of an intellectual who flees to Qingdao during the Shanghai Incident and is moved to fight the Japanese occupation of Manchuria by the death of a friend. It was sung by the actors Gu Menghe and Yuan Muzhi with a small chorus, recorded for Pathé on 9 May, and first heard in public at the film's screening in Shanghai in May 1935. The English name refers to the volunteer armies that fought Japan's invasion of Manchuria.

The film failed, but the song spread fast. Lü Ji and other leftists in Shanghai promoted it through a National Salvation singing campaign, joining the mass-singing associations of the YMCA leader Liu Liangmo; within months Feng Zikai heard it sung by crowds in villages from Zhejiang to Hunan, and in June 1936 an audience of thousands joined Liu's choir in a Shanghai stadium. The campaign grew after the Xi'an Incident of December 1936 eased Nationalist pressure on the left. Tian Han spent two years in prison, and Nie Er died in Japan. During the Second Sino-Japanese War the march was sung well beyond the Communist Party: the Nationalist general Dai Anlan made it the anthem of the 200th Division, which fought in Burma.

Abroad it became the sound of China's resistance. The Pathé recording appears in Joris Ivens's documentary The 400 Million (1939); Lee Pao-chen printed it with an English translation in a songbook in Chongqing that year, later used in American schools during the war; and the New York Times published its music. In New York in 1940 Liu Liangmo taught it to Paul Robeson, who sang it in Chinese at Lewisohn Stadium and, with Liu, recorded it in Chinese and English as "Chee Lai!" ("Arise!") for Keynote Records in early 1941, with a preface by Soong Ching-ling and the first proceeds sent to the Chinese resistance. After Pearl Harbor it was heard on British, American and Soviet radio, opened Frank Capra's film The Battle of China (1944) and was used by Allied broadcasts to stand for China.

It was first used as China's anthem at the World Peace Conference in Prague in April 1949, with a line changed by Guo Moruo and sung by Robeson. A Communist Party committee that received 632 entries chose it on the suggestion of the painter Xu Beihong, supported by Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, despite objections to its warlike words, and on 27 September 1949 it became the provisional anthem of the People's Republic, in place of the Republic of China's "Three Principles of the People" and the "Internationale". In the territories of the Republic of China its performance was banned until the 1990s.

A People's Daily article of 1 February 1966 condemning Tian Han's opera Xie Yaohuan was one of the opening attacks of the Cultural Revolution, in which Tian was imprisoned and his words forbidden; he died in prison in 1968. "The East Is Red" served for a time as the unofficial anthem, and from 1969 the march was played without words. The National People's Congress restored it on 5 March 1978 with new words naming the Communist Party, communism and Chairman Mao; after Tian's posthumous rehabilitation in 1979 his original words were restored and on 4 December 1982 it became the official national anthem. It was written into the constitution on 14 March 2004, and a National Anthem Law, passed on 1 September 2017, regulates how it is performed and respected.

It was played at the handovers of Hong Kong (1997) and Macau (1999) and is part of both regions' Basic Laws. Macau's Law No. 5/1999 punishes wilful alteration of its music or words. In Hong Kong a 1998 circular required schools to sing it at flag-raising ceremonies; it was reiterated in 2004 after the 2003 protests against proposed anti-subversion laws, and from National Day 2004 television news has been preceded by government videos with the anthem. In 2006 most Hong Kong people surveyed were neither proud nor fond of it. On 4 November 2017 the national anthem law was added to Annex III of Hong Kong's Basic Law, and on 4 June 2020 Hong Kong's Legislative Council passed the National Anthem Ordinance.

What it says

A call to resist the Japanese invasion, written for a film of 1935. Its mood is urgent and defiant.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.