Children of Troubled Times
1935 film
Children of Troubled Times, also known as Fēngyún Érnǚ, Scenes of City Life, Sons and Daughters of the Storm, Storm Sons and Daughters, Children of the Storm, and several other translations, is a patriotic 1935 Chinese film most famous as the origin of "The March of the Volunteers", the national anthem of the People's Republic of China. The movie was directed by Xu Xingzhi and written by Tian Han and Xia Yan. Yuan Muzhi plays an intellectual who flees the trouble in Shanghai to pursue the glamorous Wang Renmei only to join the Chinese resistance after the death of his friend.
Plot
A young poet Xin Baihe flees Shanghai with his friend, Liang. Liang soon joins the resistance against the Japanese invaders, but Xin chooses to pursue a relationship with a glamorous and westernized widow in Qingdao.
After hearing that Liang has been killed, however, Xin has a change of heart and rushes to join the war effort.
Communist themes
The film was a strong communist production, produced by the Diantong Film Company and based on a story by Tian Han, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member since 1932. Tian was arrested by the Nationalists shortly after it was released. In addition, it starred Yuan Muzhi, who would join the CCP in 1940 and had music by the communist composer Nie Er.
The story itself, with its tale of a wealthy man who learns to abandon the decadence of Western culture for self-sacrifice, was also a common theme among leftist films of the period.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Children of Troubled Times” as 1935 film. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1935 film. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7562279. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1932 and 1940.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Children of Troubled Times” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.