It was January 1912.The newly-formed Ministry of Education needed a national anthem for its new Republic. Letters were sent out to modernizing elites to start drafting suitably soul stirring texts.
A committee had read over three hundred submissions, but they were tossed out because there were not 'suitable.' It came down to the Republic's new boss Yuan Shikai to decide. He chose Song of the Green Clouds 'green clouds' being an ancient metaphor in Chinese for purity and loftiness. Choosing an anthem that would encapsulate the narrative of a new republic was not as easy as selecting the best stories of the nation or its best writers.
The new Republic was beset with factional fighting and local elites declaring their independence. Yuan never got the unanimous support to govern and when he died in June 1916 not before announcing that he would become the emperor in January, the country was run by warlord commanders and regional governors who carved out their own power bases. A number of national anthems circulated depending on who aspired to govern the nation. Yuan chose another anthem for the Republic in 1915 called China’s Strength and Power Strand Firm in the Cosmos. The epochal transformation from dynasty to republic is praised by none other than the mythical emperor Yao in the closing lines of the anthem.
Before the founding of the Republic, schools across the country had the own version of a anthem. Even the crumbling Qing Empire had its own anthem. In a diary entry dated September 28 1911, one of China’s pre-eminent translators wrote that he was off to the 'Imperial Qing Guard Public Office to decide on a suitable anthem.' Strengthening the Golden Bowl, was penned by Yan Fu, the aforementioned translator, and set to music by Pu Dong, a military training officer with the Imperial Guard. The empire would need more than an anthem to strengthen and unite the 'golden bowl' for within two weeks of selecting the anthem, the Qing Empire, and China’s last imperial dynasty, collapsed.
In setting a preexisting melody to a text, Yan and Pu adopted the models prescribed by the fashion of their time, but this compositional process went back much further, a practice that has its provenance in Chinese poetry. As early as the southern Song (1127-1279), it is recorded that poems were first chanted then set to a melodic line which became a song.
The process of taking 'old tunes and adding text' has striking parallels in liturgical and plainchants in medieval Europe. Contrafuctum which literally means 'to imitate,' 'to forge,' referred to the practice of a pre-existing melody set to a new text, a practice that continued well into the seventeenth century. The constant re-use of tunes, old and new and setting them to text—old and new—is so fundamental to Chinese vocal music that it barely needs to be called 'special.' We find it in narrative genres, revolutionary songs and in Chinese pop 'n' rock music.
In May 1921, Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist Government in Canton issued their own anthem. Three years later, delegates to the First National Party Congress unanimously endorsed another new anthem penned by Sun Yat-sen and composed by Cheng Maojun performed as part as a cadet ceremony at the Huangpu Military School June 16, 1924. The anthem remains the national anthem of the Republic of China, Taiwan.
Before 'March of the Volunteers' became the official communist anthem after 1949 in mainland China, Mao Zedong’s arsenal of songs included Shaanxi folk songs set to revolutionary texts. There was no shortage of 'cultural workers'—left-wing writers, intellectuals, songwriters and folk singers that would turn Yan'an into hallowed 'red' ground and inscribe the Communist story in songs.
