National Anthem of the Republic of China

The story

The "National Anthem of the Republic of China", also known from its opening as "Three Principles of the People", is the national anthem of the Republic of China, commonly called Taiwan, and the party anthem of the Kuomintang. Its text was written jointly by four members of the Kuomintang, Hu Hanmin, Tai Chi-tao, Liao Zhongkai and Shao Yuanchong, and was first heard on 16 June 1924 as the opening of a speech by Sun Yat-sen at the opening ceremony of the Whampoa Military Academy. Its first line names the Three Principles of the People, Sun's political doctrine, and informally the song is sometimes called "San Min Chu-i", a name never used on formal or official occasions.

After the success of the Northern Expedition, the Kuomintang chose the text as its party anthem and held a public competition for music to go with it; Cheng Maoyun won among 139 entrants. On 24 March 1930 many party members proposed that Sun's speech become the words of the national anthem, then the "Song to the Auspicious Cloud". Because others objected to a party's symbol standing for the whole nation, a National Anthem Editing and Research Committee was set up, and it endorsed the party song. The Central Standing Committee approved the proposal on 3 June 1937, and in the 1940s the song formally became the official national anthem.

The words are in classical literary Chinese, using old forms of words that modern speech no longer uses, and follow the conventions of the ancient fu style: lines of four characters whose last characters rhyme. In this the anthem differs from the People's Republic of China's "March of the Volunteers", written a few years later entirely in the modern vernacular. An official English translation by Theodore B. Tu appears in the government's English-language guides to the Republic of China.

The anthem became the national anthem in Taiwan on 25 October 1945, when Taiwan returned to Chinese rule after the surrender of Japan. After the government of the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan and the People's Republic of China was founded, it ceased to be the anthem on the mainland, where the "March of the Volunteers" replaced it. In Taiwan it is played at the start of flag-raising ceremonies, before the National Flag Anthem accompanies the raising of the flag. For many Taiwanese the anthem carries several, often conflicting, meanings, and some reject it outright as an anachronistic symbol of the Kuomintang dictatorship.

What it says

A national anthem in classical Chinese, opening with Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People, on how the hopes of a new nation and its people may be achieved and kept; solemn and exhortatory.

The words