Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China

The story

"Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China", also called "No Communist Party, No New China", is a song of the Chinese Communist Party. It began as an answer to a book. In March 1943, during the war against the Japanese invasion, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Kuomintang, published China's Destiny, which argued for one doctrine and one party and stated that without the Kuomintang there would be no China. On 25 August 1943 the Communist newspaper Jiefang Daily replied with an editorial, "Without the Communist Party there would be no China". From it Cao Huoxing, a 19-year-old party member, made a song on the same theme with the title "Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No China".

The word "new" was added later, and the accounts differ on how. In a 1989 memoir Pang Xianzhi, deputy head of the party's Central Documentation Research Office, wrote that in 1950, hearing his daughter Li Na sing the song, Mao Zedong remarked that China had existed long before the Communist Party, so the title should speak of a new China, and that he then raised the change at a meeting of the Central Committee. Cao Huoxing's own account says the word was added in 1949, shortly before the end of the Pingjin campaign, when the party's Propaganda Department judged the old title unsuitable. Another account gives the 1950 version, after the founding of the People's Republic.

The song is included in the 1965 film The East Is Red. Cao Huoxing's manuscript is held by the Tianjin Municipal Archives. In a 1993 interview, at 69, he said the song's title applied to his own life as well and that he would always write songs for the people and the party.

On 26 June 2006 a memorial hall to the song, the No Communist Party, No New China Memorial Hall, opened in Tangshang village, Xiayunling, in Beijing's Fangshan District, the place where the song was written; the old site where it was composed is preserved nearby. The hall was named a Beijing patriotic education base in 2002, a national classic red-tourism site in 2010 and, in 2019, a national patriotic education demonstration site. In June 2021 a 587-metre musical road was laid on China National Highway 108 near Xiayunling, so that cars driving over it play the song's melody through the vibration of their tyres. It was sung by a choir at the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021.

What it says

A party song presenting the Chinese Communist Party as the maker of the new China; rousing and affirmative.

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.