The Republic and People's Republic (1912-)
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, China has experienced a highly turbulent history, with periods of strife and economic downfall alternating with those of energetic reconstruction. The first key event in a long series was the First Opium War of 1839-42, where the British used military force to protect and develop their trade in drugs, even though the imported opium was causing massive disruption and hardship to the Chinese economy and population. One of the outcomes of this war was the seizure of Chinese ports (such as Hong Kong, returned only in 1997) and other territories by the British, quickly followed by numerous other foreign powers who used their new access to what was then the world's largest economy to import goods and services, including cultural products such as musical instruments and religious practices.
Other significant events included the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), a civil war in China waged from 1850 to 1864 between the established Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom under Hong Xiuquan, that caused great disruption in central regions over an extended period; the Xinhai or 1911 Revolution that saw the Qing dynasty finally overthrown and replaced by a Republican government intent on modernizing the nation; the May Fourth Movement of 1919, an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student protests against the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, which gave further impetus to the modernizing reforms in the context of Chinese dismay at their treatment by their erstwhile allies in World War I; Japanese military aggression and conquest, which began early in the twentieth century, accelerating rapidly in the 1930s, and only resolved finally by the end of World War II in 1945; civil war leading up to the declaration of a Communist Party-led People's Republic in 1949, which brought in new ideologies and patterns of social organization; and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a socio-political movement whose stated goal was to preserve 'true' Communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and during which China mostly cut itself off from the outside world. Together, these significant events-and others too long to list-caused the collapse of the two-thousand-year-old Chinese political system and the disintegration of the old ruling classes.
These events had numerous musical impacts. For instance, Christian missionaries brought Western music, especially hymn singing, deep into remote parts of China, thereby encouraging collective singing as a way of spreading their message. Meanwhile, as a traditional model of family-based private teaching gave way to a public school model similar to that found in the West, music educators studied overseas, mainly in Japan, Europe, and America, and brought back aspects of Western classical music to apply to Chinese settings, eventually founding the present-day system of high-level music conservatories. A new genre of school song was one immediate consequence. The melodies were mainly brought from Japan, with also a few newly written ones; the songs present educational messages (Lau 2008: 91; Jones 2001). Hymn-singing and school songs fused in a second genre of mass-oriented songs used in political campaigns. According to Andrew Jones, this musical genre combined its choral style with Soviet mass music and military marches, which had been disseminated in China in the 1930s.
Modern Chinese songs were promoted by those advocating different religious and political stances in the age of national revival and modernization.
