Shen Xingong was the first musician to create a music class in the new style school. He is a native of Shanghai, his original name was Shen Qinghong, the character Shu Kui, and the pen name Xingong.
He was taught at a home school at an early age, and in 1897 he was admitted to the Nanyang Public School Normal School, and in April 1902, he traveled east to Japan to study at The Hongbun Academy in Tokyo.
Inspired by music education in Japanese schools, he organized "music workshops" among international students, studied the production of music songs, and wrote the first music song "Gymnastics and Soldier Exercises", also known as "Boys' First Ambition".
In February 1903, Shen Xingong returned to China and taught at nanyang elementary school and created a "singing" class.
Since then, Shen Xingong has successively taught music and music classes in Wuben Girls' School, Nanyang Middle School, Shanghai Longmen Normal School and other places for nearly 25 years.
In 1927, his career as a music teacher was essentially over.
Shen Xingong wrote and created more than 180 school songs in his lifetime, and from 1904 onwards, he edited and published 3 episodes of "School Singing Collection", 6 episodes of "Re-edited School Singing Collection" and 4 episodes of "Republic of China Singing Collection". In addition, he translated and published the book "Teaching Singing in Primary Schools".
Most of the songs compiled and created by Shen Xingong take democratic education as the main content.
He is good at describing the things in children's lives, conveying progressive and civilized ideas to students in plain language, and is the first author to write lyrics in the vernacular.
His representative works include "Yellow River", "Song from the Army", "Patriotic", etc., which express the patriotic spirit; "Revolutionary Army" and "Beautiful China", which advocate the national revolution and praise the New Deal of the Republic; "Women's Study Song", "Telegram", and "Textile", which advocate equal rights for men and women and attach importance to science.