By Huang Lanlan and Liang Rui

Conceptual photo of a robot playing piano Photo: VCG

It was nearly 11 o'clock at night, and Liu Zhao's computer screen was still glowing. Scattered across his desktop were several half-edited drafts of lyrics, while the waveform graphs from his AI music software rose and fell like mountain ranges against the dark interface. He took off his headphones, rubbed his tired ears and put them back on.

He often stays up late, meticulously polishing a few lines of lyrics or a handful of notes. As one of the core creators behind "Polaris Radio," a music account recently gaining attention on Chinese social media platforms, the 40-year-old architect and his team are using AI tools to do something they find deeply meaningful: take the revolutionary stories and red (patriotic) spirit in history textbooks and breathe them back into melodies that young people already know and love.

As AI-generated technologies rapidly advance and become increasingly widespread in China, the barriers to music creation are gradually being broken down. Among the emerging trends is the use of AI to produce songs with revolutionary and patriotic themes, which has become a new way for some Chinese people to express their love for the country.

Many creators of AI patriotic songs told the Global Times that they have come to love this way of using music to voice their devotion to the motherland with the help of AI, giving red narratives fresh vitality and renewed energy in the digital age.

"I hope that when people hear these familiar tunes, they'll remember those who came before us, who burned for their ideals, and feel the power of faith across time," Liu told the Global Times. "I want them to understand that the lives we live today were bought by countless others walking their lonely paths."

Paying tribute through music

To Liu, the original melody of the popular song Cold Lonely Sandbank carries a natural "cold yet resilient undertone."

"It resonates instinctively with the way revolutionary forebears held onto their ideals in the face of adversity," Liu said. The lyrics are borrowed from Chinese poet Su Shi's classical verse - the line about "looking all over, he won't perch on branches dead" - and are paired with the revolutionaries' defiant spirit: "even if millions stand against me, I will go forward."

That realization led the team to reshape this well-known love song into a battle hymn of red revolution. In the lyrics, the solitary goose's wanderings are transformed into revolutionaries "holding torches aloft to break through the siege." Lines like "red flags unfurling across the horizon, shining with glory" and "ideals in the heart, never to fade" look back at revolutionary victory while spurring on today's youth.

"Ideals are never empty slogans," Liu told the Global Times. "They are the light won by countless people with their blood and their persistence."

The entire creation process took several days. Other team members handled the lyric adaptation, while Liu took charge of AI arrangement, vocal tuning and video production.

What he remembers most vividly is refining the mood and texture of the lyrics. "Every line had to be weighed again and again," he said. "It had to honor the historical depth, preserve the original melody's rhythmic beauty, and let the old and new emotions blend naturally."

"Polaris Radio" doesn't have a fixed office. Most of the team members are uploaders of Bilibili, one of China's leading video-sharing platforms, scattered across the country, bound by a shared love for red culture and music. They coordinate online, each taking on different roles.

Their use of AI to create revolutionary music happened almost by accident. One member tried out an AI music tool and discovered it could spread the stories of the international communist movement and revolutionary pioneers in a fast, vivid way - "far more engaging than just reading text." From there, the team dove headfirst into making AI-powered red songs.

Through this ongoing creative process, Liu said he has gained a truer understanding of the red spirit. "It's not just a mark in history," he explained. "It's the spiritual backbone of the Chinese nation, passed down through generations. Creating these songs is also a way of looking back at our nation's path and deepening our sense of family and country."

Since the "red version" of Cold Lonely Sandbank went online, it has struck a deep chord with listeners. Many commenters said they felt, in the music, "the nation's character and the warmth of homeland."

And this widely shared track is no isolated case. On the account's homepage, there are now nearly 200 such creations, with one video reaching close to 1.6 million views.

Without hesitating, Liu said the series of adaptations of poems about the revolution led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) are his favorites.

"Those poems are masterpieces in their own right, epic in scale, profound in mood, blending history and poetry seamlessly. Setting them to modern AI-composed music isn't just creative work. It's a way of paying tribute through music to a great era and a great spirit," Liu told the Global Times.

An artificial intelligence system which can provide fitting instrumental accompaniment for people's singing is displayed during the Shanghai Education Expo on May 24, 2026. Photo: VCG

'Very enthusiastic'

Back in early 2024, a small group of enthusiasts had already begun exploring the possibilities of AI music creation - specifically, its potential to merge with China's revolutionary red culture.

The China AIGC (AI-generated content) Industrial Alliance or "AIGCxChina" in short, is a nationwide civil group of China's AIGC industry insiders. In the spring of 2024, before China's Youth Day on May 4, the group's initiator Ni Kaomeng proposed an idea: to stage an online AI concert themed around Youth Day. Soon after, volunteers from the group began promoting the event and organized a series of online public lectures to teach participants how to use AI tools to make music.

What seemed like a novel experiment at the time turned out to be a hit: over 1,000 participants from more than 100 universities across China created some 120 AI-generated songs centered on patriotism and affection for their universities. AIGCxChina then edited these works into a 115-minute online concert program, which was streamed on China's popular video platforms such as Bilibili on Youth Day.

According to Ni, the livestream drew more than 200,000 viewers across the internet.

"Our original intention was to encourage young people to use AI music to speak for their universities, their youth and their country," Ni told the Global Times. "The strong response to this event has made us even more determined to keep creating AI red songs."

In the months that followed, AIGCxChina and its sub-group, AIGCxMusic, held a series of red-song creation events, spanning major commemorative occasions, such as the founding anniversary of the CPC on July 1, and the founding anniversary of the Chinese People's Liberation Army on August 1. "Each event receives two to three hundred AI music submissions. People are very enthusiastic about expressing patriotic feelings through music," said Zhang Huangpeiyao, head of AIGCxMusic.

A doctoral graduate in music, Zhang, who is better known among many AI music creators by her screen name "Zhinan," is also an active creator of AI-generated red songs. She first used AI to write a patriotic song on the eve of August 1, 2024, when she came up with a creative idea of extracting the titles of several classic red songs from CPC history and weaving them together along a historical timeline into a brand-new composition generated with AI.

Throughout the night, working with AI tools that were still far from mature, Zhang painstakingly refined the lyrics and generated, then revised, the visuals for the video. "Back then, the AI-generated images were still very rough. Sometimes you'd even get three arms or a completely distorted face, so everything had to be manually adjusted," Zhang recalled.

After pulling an all-nighter, the song - titled The Road to Glory - was finally complete, and Zhang was filled with a sense of accomplishment and pride. Her mother loved it too. "My maternal grandfather served in the military. When my mom heard the song, she said it felt as if she could see her father in his military uniform again," Zhang told the Global Times.

The song later aired on some local TV stations and drew even more positive feedback online. "A single song condenses the Party's struggles in the grand revolutionary and reform journey toward the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," one literary and history scholar commented on the song's online page. "It always stirs up some emotions."

Conceptual photo of AI-generated music Photo: VCG

From bystanders to participants

Beyond creating red songs, AI technology is now being deeply integrated into the dissemination of revolutionary culture and grassroots Party-building efforts, becoming a new vehicle for carrying forward revolutionary spirit in the new era, and reshaping the expressive paradigm of red narratives, Ni said.

Ni has long been committed to promoting the creative integration of AI tech with publicity and education of revolutionary and patriotic themes. He told the Global Times that AI is bringing several breakthrough changes to the red-themed outreach.

"First, it breaks through the cost barrier, as traditional production of red-themed music or videos requires substantial investment and professional teams. Second, it expands the narrative dimension, because AI can transform the deeds of some revolutionary martyrs, which may exist only in written historical records, into audiovisual works that can be seen and heard. Third, it enhances educational effectiveness, as, to the creators, the creative process itself is immersive red education," he explained.

Echoing Ni, Zhang said she believes one of the most significant values of AI creation is that, the technology is not merely a tool for efficiency, but an "engine of empathy."

"Traditional red education is often a top-down, one-way form of instruction, with young people cast as passive bystanders. But when they try to create with AI, their role changes fundamentally - they become participants," Zhang told the Global Times.

"Generating a red song by AI, I need to sort through the historical context in order to write accurate lyrics; I need to understand the texture of that era in order to generate visuals that feel authentic," she added. "For me, when I personally type revolutionary spirit and patriotic sentiment into prompts and watch them transform into vivid audiovisual impact, my own sense of destiny resonates powerfully with the historical trajectory of the nation."

Moving forward, Polaris Radio will continue to focus on red history, national development and the spirit of the era, Liu said. The team will keep refining their adaptations by blending in more traditional Chinese and folk elements, while also creating new works based on key historical figures, major events and modern-day stories of struggle, he told the Global Times.

On the video page of the "red version" of Cold Lonely Sandbank, new bullet comments and messages kept popping up. One student wrote: "Our class is going to sing this song for our choir performance. We've printed out the lyrics and we're practicing it every day now."

"We hope to take AI music as a medium to continuously enrich our musical creations in both content and style, so that music embodying national spirit and patriotism can reach and resonate with wider audiences, and red culture and the national spirit can be passed down." Liu said, as he read through the comments.