Tian Han

Founding Father of Modern Chinese Drama

Tian Han was born on 12 March 1898 into a poor peasant family in Changsha, Hunan Province. In 1916 he travelled with his uncle to Japan to study English at Tokyo Higher Normal School; in 1919, while in Tokyo, he joined the Young China Association founded by Li Dazhao and others, and began publishing poetry and criticism, and in 1921 he co-founded the Creation Society with Guo Moruo, Cheng Fangwu, and Yu Dafu. After returning to China in 1922 he took a position at the Shanghai Zhonghua Book Company's editorial department, co-founded the Southern China Bimonthly with his wife Yi Shuyu, and established the Southern Society (南国社) to experiment with and popularise vernacular spoken drama; between 1928 and 1929 the Southern Society's touring troupe performed in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Wuxi to considerable acclaim, before the Nationalist government shut it down in 1930. That same year he co-founded the League of Left-Wing Dramatists, combining theatrical art with social transformation and using the stage to awaken patriotic sentiment and class consciousness. In 1932 he secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party, becoming Party group secretary of the League of Left-Wing Dramatists. His major works include The Death of a Famous Actor (名优之死) and Guan Hanqing (关汉卿), both of lasting importance in Chinese theatrical history.

March of the Volunteers and Anti-Japanese Cultural Work

In 1935 Tian Han wrote the screenplay for the patriotic film Children of Troubled Times; the song lyrics he contributed were set to music by Nie Er as the March of the Volunteers. According to accounts of the period, Tian Han wrote the lyrics on the back of a cigarette paper just before his arrest by the Nationalist government, smuggling them out of detention — an act that embodied the very spirit of the line "Advance, advance, advance under the enemy's fire." On 19 February 1935, Tian Han was arrested by Nationalist authorities for his involvement in the left-wing theatre movement and imprisoned alongside his friend Yang Hansheng in a Nationalist prison in Nanjing; he was released on bail on 27 July that year through the intervention of Xu Beihong, Zong Baihua, and Zhang Daofan, though barred from leaving Nanjing or engaging in political activity. During the Second Sino-Japanese War he actively participated in the cultural resistance movement, organising theatrical performances to mobilise public support for the war effort.

Persecution During the Cultural Revolution

After 1949, Tian Han served as Chairman of the Chinese Dramatists Association and was a leading figure in the cultural establishment. In 1961 he wrote the Peking opera Xie Yaohuan, portraying a female imperial censor who fights for the common people against corrupt nobles and is ultimately tortured to death — a work some critics regard as the peak of his dramatic career. In June 1964, Kang Sheng denounced the opera in an internal report as a "poisonous weed" and claimed that "Tian Han has serious problems in his history," an allusion to his 1935 arrest and subsequent parole in Nanjing. When the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966, Xie Yaohuan was publicly denounced alongside Wu Han's Hai Rui Dismissed from Office and Meng Chao's Li Huiniang as "veiled criticism" and "anti-Party, anti-socialist," becoming one of the opening salvos of the Cultural Revolution's cultural purges; Tian Han was subjected to struggle sessions and imprisonment. In February 1967 he was imprisoned in Qincheng Prison in Beijing, where a special investigation team focused on his 1935 arrest and subsequent house arrest in Nanjing. In July 1968, suffering from heart disease and diabetes, he was transferred to Beijing's No. 301 Hospital, where interrogation continued. He died in hospital on 10 December 1968, aged 70. His death, alongside the effective prohibition of the March of the Volunteers during the Cultural Revolution, constitutes one of the most striking historical paradoxes of the People's Republic: a regime that persecuted the lyricist of its own national anthem while continuing to treat the song as a national symbol. Tian Han was posthumously rehabilitated in 1979.