'March of the Volunteers' anthem endured a long route to acceptance

As it blares out before the evening news or as all-conquering Olympians stand on top of the podium, it is easy to imagine that March of the Volunteers was enshrined in the constitution as soon as Mao Zedong had finished the inauguration of the People's Republic.

In fact, the national anthem's journey to formal acceptance is as twisting as the march it portrays, and it was not ratified as the national anthem under the constitution until 2004.

Just like The Star-Spangled Banner and La Marseillaise, March of the Volunteers was written during a war. It was first used in the soundtrack to a 1935 Shanghai film called Children of a Troubled Time, which called on Chinese youth to resist the expanding Japanese presence in China.

The music was composed by Nie Er, a gifted musician who drowned later that year in Japan at the age of only 23. The lyrics were written by Tian Han in late 1934.

Tian was a member of the Communist Party and wrote the screenplay for the film. Shortly afterwards he was arrested by the Kuomintang, who were seeking to destroy the Communists, many of whom were on the Long March at the time.

The song resonated with many who heard it, and it quickly spread. 'The Chinese nation faces its greatest peril. All forcefully expend their last cries' were words that encapsulated the thoughts of many patriotic Chinese saddened at the woeful state of their country.

Paul Robeson, one of the most celebrated black American performers in the 1930s and 1940s, helped take the song global, performing it in English and Chinese in Egypt, the Soviet Union and some other European countries during the second world war.