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Liu Liangmo ''Liángmó'') (b. Ningbo, Zhejiang 6 November 1909 d. 8 August 1988 Shanghai ) was a musician and Chinese Christian leader known for his promotion of the patriotic mass singing movement in the 1930s and promotion in the United States of support for China's resistance to Japan in World War II. He was a leader in the Christian Three Selves Patriotic Movement after 1949. ==Education and discovery of mass singing== While in middle school Liu converted to Christianity and soon became a student secretary (organizer) for the Shanghai YMCA. He attended University of Shanghai, a Baptist missionary institution, where he did not receive formal musical training but sang in the university church choir. He graduated in 1932 with a degree in sociology. He then took a position with the Chinese National YMCA. China did not have a tradition of group singing, but Christian church congregations and mission student groups had begun to use music as an attraction as early as the 19th century. When Liu happened upon ''Music Unites People'', a book of songs, he was moved to form singing groups as a way of promoting patriotism and moral virtue. Liu declared “My plan was to make music the possession of all and not the privilege of the few.” In February 1935, with encouragement from the YMCA, Liu established a mass singing club for some sixty clerks, doorkeepers, office boys, elevator operators, and apprentices. Within a week, the number of participants had nearly tripled, and by mid-1936 the group, known as the People’s Song Association, had attracted more than 1,000 members, with regional branches in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. ==Mass singing and resistance to Japan== Liu wrote in 1935 :If we Chinese want to break free of imperialism’s iron shackles..., if we want China to exert itself, our people must be able to loudly and vigorously sing powerful songs full of spirit and vitality. If the people of China can sing these songs, no doubt the sound will shake the earth. Any youth who can sing should spread the “people’s song” movement to each province, city, county, and countryside. The dawning of a new China will arrive when all the people of China can sing these majestic and powerful songs.〔quoted in Howard (2014).〕 In June 1936 Liu stood on a two-meter high platform in a sports arena in Shanghai packed with thousands to lead a several hundred member chorus in "The March of the Volunteers, " a patriotic song which after 1949 became the national anthem. Mass singing became even more widespread as it proved its ability to mobilize patriotic support for the government following the Xi'an Incident of December 1936. As relations with Japan grew more tense, in February 1937, at the invitation of General Fu Zuoyi and acting under the auspices of the national YMCA, Liu formed a war zone Soldier Relief Board in Suiyuan, in western China. Liu later recalled that General Fu told him that “Mass singing and slogans are the two great weapons to train the people and soldiers. Of the two, singing is more important because during the war it can stimulate a spirit of unity among our soldiers and masses.” Israel Epstein, then a young reporter for a Tianjin newspaper, reported many years later that he first heard Liu in the gymnasium of the Tianjin YMCA in the summer of 1937. The hall was filled with “ordinary people from the street – students, petty clerks, workmen, schoolchildren, newsboys, and even rickshaw pullers,” who “with serious faces repeated the separate phrase of the song they were being taught. Then they sang two phrases at a time. Then a whole stanza....” Epstein further recalled that Liu :seemed to be listening to and prompting each singer separately, while at the same time he never stopped singing. He seemed two men – one singing, like his audience with relieved passion at being able at last to utter the ‘one last cry’ of every Chinese; the other disciplined and methodical, teaching and listening. Two Japanese detectives appeared, and some of the audience seemed intimidated, but Liu merely said that the doors of the hall were open to all who had come to sing, and asked the detectives to join in singing "March of the Volunteers." Afterwards Liu explained to Epstein that if he had allowed the Japanese to intimidate him, the young men he hoped to train would have drifted away, but that if he had incited the crowd to throw the Japanese out, the movement would have been shut down. "You do not realize," he told Epstein, how important an instrument an easily-learned song is." Many Chinese cannot cannot read, but "the song carries resistance from mouth to mouth." 〔Israel Epstein, ''History Must Not Be Forgotten'' (Beijing, 2005), (33-34 )〕 After the outbreak of the war with Japan in August 1937, Liu continued to work with the YMCA Soldier Relief Board to provide shelter and relief for wounded soldiers. For a while the United Front provided a truce between the Communist and Nationalist Parties, but by the summer of 1939, the United Front was breaking down. While the Communists were enthusiastic about music as a way to mobilize popular support, the Nationalists were suspicious that popular cultural activities were being manipulated to Communist advantage. The Soldier Relief Board and Liu's team of relief workers were in Changsha, Hunan, when the local Nationalist military burned the town to prevent it from falling into the hands of an anticipated Japanese advance which never materialized. Liu’s group managed to save the YMCA building and to evacuate many of the wounded soldiers, but determined it would be safer to move on to Zhejiang. In Zhejiang, Liu tried to keep good relations with local Nationalist government and army, but when Zhou Enlai visited him, the military police became suspicious and raided Liu's relief camp. The communist New Fourth Army invited him to join their cultural work, but Liu feared the political control that the move would have required. Liu saw his Christian faith as more important than loyalty to either the GMD or the CCP. Liu set out for Shanghai to seek the support of Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, who had become the protector of leftist cultural activities, but before he could reach her the Nationalist police put him under house arrest. Only the intervention of the American YMCA freed him. He soon left with his family for the United States and did not return to China for nearly ten years. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Liu Liangmo」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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