China

The March of the Volunteers (义勇军进行曲, Yìyǒngjūn Jìnxíngqǔ) is the national anthem of the People's Republic of China. Playwright Tian Han wrote the lyrics in 1934 as part of a poem titled The Great Wall, and composer Nie Er set them to music in 1935 for the Shanghai film Children of Troubled Times, which dramatized resistance to Japan's occupation of northeast China after the 1931 Mukden Incident. Russian composer Aaron Avshalomov arranged the orchestration, and the song spread through nationalist singing campaigns long before it acquired any official status. On 27 September 1949, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference adopted the song as the provisional anthem of the new People's Republic, declared by Mao Zedong four days later. The lyrics, written for a film about a country at war, were carried into the new state largely unchanged, with their opening cry, 'Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves,' framing the founding moment of the PRC. During the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976), lyricist Tian Han was denounced as a counter-revolutionary and imprisoned, dying in custody in 1968. From that point the lyrics could no longer be sung in public, and the anthem was effectively replaced in state ceremonies by The East Is Red, a song praising Mao Zedong. In March 1978 the National People's Congress restored the melody but adopted new lyrics referencing Chairman Mao, the Communist Party and the Long March. The original 1935 lyrics were not officially reinstated until 4 December 1982, when the Fifth National People's Congress confirmed the March of the Volunteers, with Tian Han's text, as the national anthem. The anthem entered the Constitution in March 2004 and was further codified by the National Anthem Law that took effect on 1 October 2017, which sets rules on official use and penalizes 'malicious modification' of the lyrics or melody. The same statute extended the anthem's protection to the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions following parallel local legislation in 2020 and 1999 respectively. The song is built on a brisk Western-style march in F major, atypical for East Asian anthems, and runs roughly 46 seconds at official tempo, making it one of the shortest national anthems in regular ceremonial use. Its imagery, especially the 'new Great Wall' built from 'flesh and blood,' fixes the anthem in a wartime moment rather than a triumphal one: it is the anthem of a nation that imagines itself perpetually at the most dangerous hour.