Nie Er (聂耳)

Nie Er (聂耳; 1912–1935) was a Chinese composer born in Kunming, Yunnan, who wrote the March of the Volunteers (义勇军进行曲), the national anthem of the People's Republic of China, and a body of left-wing mass songs and film music in the early 1930s¹. His original name was Nie Shouxin (聂守信), with the courtesy name Ziyi (子义, also written 紫艺)¹. He died by drowning in Japan in July 1935 at the age of 23, having composed for less than three years².

Early life and flight to Shanghai

Nie Er was born in Kunming in 1912 and showed an early appetite for music, teaching himself the flute and the huqin and performing with companions in public while still a schoolboy¹. In 1928, while a student at the Yunnan Provincial First Normal School, he joined the Chinese Communist Youth League at 16 and took part in student movements organized by the underground Party in Kunming². He also read Marxist works in middle school; in a 1931 diary entry he wrote that without a stable philosophical foundation, no path could be walked to the end⁵.

In 1930, after a traitor's betrayal exposed him, he left Yunnan for Shanghai, departing in July 1930 by way of Vietnam and Hong Kong^{2 • 3}. Sources place him at 18 or 19 years old on arrival^{2 • 6}.

Shanghai and the left-wing music movement

First jobs and musical training. In Shanghai Nie Er worked as a shop assistant at the Yunfeng trading firm; when the firm closed he lost his job and turned to music^{3 • 6}. He joined the Mingyue song-and-dance troupe, the earliest professional song-and-dance society in Shanghai, run by the popular-music pioneer Li Jinhui, whose performers included film stars such as Jin Yan, Zhou Xuan, and Wang Renmei². It was in Shanghai that he began formal study of composition; he was moved whenever he heard The Internationale or La Marseillaise, and told friends he wanted to compose a Chinese Marseillaise².

The January 28 Incident of 1932, the Japanese attack on Shanghai, shook him politically and set him thinking about how revolutionary music could serve national liberation³. He explored left-wing music theory in articles such as A Short Treatise on Chinese Song and Dance (中国歌舞短论) and Music for Films (电影的音乐配奏), criticizing what he called Li Jinhui's vulgar, escapist entertainment; the articles drew wide public response³. In his journalism he pressed film directors not to make their work a tool for numbing the class consciousness of the masses⁵.

Party membership and organized work. In early 1933, introduced by the playwright Tian Han, Nie Er joined the Chinese Communist Party². That spring, with Tian Han's encouragement, he organized a music group within the Soviet Friends Society and the Chinese New Music Research Society together with Ren Guang, Zhang Shu, and An E³. He worked across the left-wing film, theater, and music fronts: at Lianhua Pictures he played a miner in Light of Motherly Love (母性之光) and wrote its insert song Mining Song (开矿歌), the first cry of the laboring class he put on screen³.

1934, his "music year." In April 1934 the Party arranged for him to join the British-owned Pathé (百代) record company in Shanghai, assisting the music director Ren Guang³. He called 1934 his "music year" (我的音乐年)³. That year he wrote the songs for Tian Han's opera The Storm on the Yangtze (扬子江暴风雨), including Song of the Dockworkers, Bricklayers' Song, Pile-Driver's Song, and Coolie Song, and appeared in the opera as an old worker³. For the film Plunder of Peach and Plum (桃李劫) he wrote Graduation Song (毕业歌), and for The Big Road (大路) the songs Vanguard (开路先锋) and Big Road Song (大路歌)³. In November 1934, under political pressure, Pathé interfered with the music department's song selection and Nie Er was forced to leave the company³.

His songs also reached ordinary listeners through recordings. When the "New Voice" gathering of his friend Zhang He was written up in the New Evening Post, the columnist noted that the audience had come for the newly pressed records of modern songs and film songs³.

The March of the Volunteers and death

In late autumn 1934 Tian Han wrote the film story Children of Troubled Times (风云儿女); months later he was arrested, and Xia Yan took over the screenplay². Nie Er volunteered to compose the music; after reading Tian Han's lyric for the theme song he told Xia Yan, "Let me write it, Tian Han will agree," and the song became the March of the Volunteers². He worked on it almost without rest, beating time on the table, playing the piano, pacing the floor, and singing aloud until his landlady, thinking him mad, asked him to leave².

In April 1935, as the Kuomintang intensified its destruction of Shanghai revolutionary organizations and news spread that Nie Er was to be arrested, he left for Japan³. He sailed on the Nagasaki-maru, reaching Nagasaki on 16 April and Tokyo on 18 April². A first draft of the March of the Volunteers was complete before he left; in Japan he revised and finalized the score and mailed it back to China².

On 17 July 1935 he drowned while swimming at Kugenuma beach in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, at the age of 23². A family recollection by his brother Nie Xulun describes a strong swimmer who, in a competitive spirit, swam into deep water and could not withstand the long pounding of the waves¹.

Works and musical character

In less than three years of composition Nie Er left 36 songs and 6 pieces of traditional-instrument music². Besides the film and stage songs already named, his catalog includes Newspaper-Selling Song (卖报歌), Song of the Singing Girls Under the Iron Heel (铁蹄下的歌女), Meiniang's Song (梅娘曲), and the instrumental Dance of the Golden Snake (金蛇狂舞)¹. For the film New Women (新女性) he wrote a set of songs to words by Sun Shiyi depicting cotton-mill women workers awakening in their labor and daily life³.

A contemporary assessment by the educator and writer Chu Tunan, published in 1938 under the title Why Nie Er Is Great, described his singing as the first, most ferocious voice of the oppressed laboring masses and of the liberation of the Chinese nation⁵. The music critic Li Ling (1913–2003), in a 1942 interview with Nie Er's brother Nie Xulun, credited the songs with capturing the brave spirit of revolutionary youth and the language of their new life, giving voice to a nation on the edge of destruction¹.

Legacy

With the public release of Children of Troubled Times, the March of the Volunteers spread across China, and after the founding of the People's Republic it was adopted as the national anthem². Scholarship on Nie Er, such as Joshua Howard's study Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China's Sonic Nationalism, traces how his songs circulated through film, social movements, and commemoration, and how the party-state during the Maoist era cultivated his public persona as a morally virtuous idealist⁷.

Films about his life. In 1959, as a tribute for the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic, Shanghai Haiyan Film Studio produced the color music biopic Nie Er, directed and co-written by Zheng Junli and starring Zhao Dan; it was the first music biopic of the People's Republic and used Nie Er's Vanguard as its opening music^{4 • 8}. The film covers Nie Er's last five years, 1930 to 1935, and won a biopic award at the 12th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia in 1960⁴. In 2019 the film Song for the Nation (为国而歌), directed by his grandnephew Qing Shan and starring Wang Lei as Nie Er, was released for the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic, centered on the writing of the March of the Volunteers⁹.

His family preserved his records, diaries, and photograph albums; his niece Nie Lihua, born in 1935, the year he died, became a composer at the Yunnan Nationalities Film Studio, and her son Qing Shan works as a composer and music producer¹⁰.

References

1. 聂耳与他在二三十年代的音乐创作 (Nie Er and his music of the 1920s–30s), CNR / Chinese Social Sciences Net
2. 昨夜星辰今夜风：人民音乐家聂耳, CCTV History Channel 记忆
3. 艺术斗士聂耳，唱出人民大众的战歌, 中共云南党史网 / 中央党史和文献研究院网
4. 聂耳 Nie Er (1959), 1905电影网
5. 聂耳：民族觉醒的号角 人民解放的鼙鼓, 中共云南党史网
6. Nie Er, Festival des 3 Continents
7. Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China's Sonic Nationalism, JSTOR
8. 《聂耳》：为国而歌, 中国共产党新闻网
9. 聂耳（中国音乐家）, 百度百科
10. 〖建党百年·口述云南〗23岁，他写了一首歌，我们唱了86年, 云南网

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Biographical films of musicians, artists, and writers › Biographical films about visual and performing artists

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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