General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Run for Young (风犬少年的天空)

Run for Young (风犬少年的天空) is a 2020 Chinese youth drama series of 16 episodes, directed by Zhang Yibai, Han Yan, and Li Bingqiang, written by the novelist Li Zelin from his own novel Feng Quan Shaonian de Tiankong (疯犬少年的天空), and starring Peng Yuchang, Zhang Jingyi, Liang Jingkang, Zhou Yiran, Zhang Youhao, Guo Cheng, and Zhou You.¹ It premiered on September 24, 2020 on the streaming platforms Huanxi Shouying and Bilibili, and follows a group of high school seniors in Chongqing at the turn of the millennium as they stumble through friendship, family, and first love.²

Key fact	Detail
Format	16-episode youth/comedy web drama, Chinese mainland production³
Premiere	September 24, 2020, jointly on Huanxi Shouying and Bilibili²
Creative team	Directors Zhang Yibai, Han Yan, Li Bingqiang; screenwriter Li Zelin, adapting his own novel¹
Setting	Chongqing in the millennium era, centered on a school in the Jiefangbei district²
Reception	Douban 8.0 from 207,385 raters and Bilibili 8.1 from 100,375 raters as of March 7, 2024¹
Viewership	300 million views on Bilibili by the October 22, 2020 finale; topped Bilibili's hot-search list for 24 consecutive days⁴
Follow-up	The 2021 musical film Ran Ye Shaonian de Tiankong (燃野少年的天空) adapts the same source novel with Peng Yuchang again as lead⁵

Spoilers

Story and characters

The series is set in the millennium years at a school in central Chongqing, where a fresh, self-contained campus stands among towering commercial buildings, and two very different groups of teenagers meet at an unstable point in their growing up.⁶ The local four friends of Daxing village are Tu Jun, nicknamed "Lao Gou" (Old Dog), played by Peng Yuchang; Zhu Weijiao, "Da Li Jiao" (Mighty Jiao), played by Zhou Yiran; Ding Rongliang, "Mimi", played by Zhang Youhao; and Luo Shenxi, "Da Zui" (Big Mouth), played by Guo Cheng. Into their circle come the well-brought-up transfer student Ma Tian (Liang Jingkang) and the excellent student An Ran (Zhang Jingyi). On Ma Tian's first day, Old Dog extorts money from him and the two become enemies, but Old Dog then falls for An Ran, who arrived with Ma Tian, while Ma Tian develops feelings for Mighty Jiao.³ Zhou You plays Liu Wenqin, a "society" young man weighed down by his family of origin.²

Growth problems as the real subject. The drama gives each character a specific family situation rather than leaving parents offstage. Old Dog's parents divorced when he was young; he lives with his father, whom he cannot talk to despite being easygoing with everyone else. Mighty Jiao, the only girl among the four, was raised as a boy, and her awakening gender consciousness forces her to rethink her relationships. Mimi, doted on by parents who had him late in life, has to face the task of weaning himself off them.⁷ The sixteen episodes span roughly one year of the students' senior high school life, weaving together questions of friendship, family, and love that the characters cannot avoid.¹

Running as a motif. A marathon competition structures much of the story. Early on, the shared goal of the race pushes the Daxing village four and the newcomers toward each other; midway, after Tu Jun's father dies unexpectedly, the marathon becomes the turning point that carries him out of grief; by the end, running is no longer just a way out of sorrow but his life goal. When Ma Tian faces a crisis of trust with his parents and friends, he too runs out of his situation. The critic Peng Qin reads the recurring image of running as both a positive attitude toward life and a sign of the teenagers' independent self-awareness.⁸ The team name "Feng Quan" (wind dog) itself comes from a line in the plot: cool like the wind, wild like a dog.⁹

Production background

A Chongqing reunion. Director Zhang Yibai and writer Li Zelin are both from Chongqing and both attended Chongqing No. 29 Middle School, as schoolmates separated by more than twenty years. The school sits in the busiest part of the city near Jiefangbei, nicknamed the "school under the neon lights," where children from very different family backgrounds share one school district. Zhang had long wanted to film his old schoolmates but lacked a text; after buying the rights to Li's novel Feng Quan Shaonian de Tiankong and discovering their shared alma mater, Li wrote the screenplay based on his own experiences there.¹⁰ The actress Xu Jinglei helped bring Li Zelin and Zhang Yibai together, and the drama marked Li's first turn from novelist to screenwriter.¹¹

Platform context. On August 31, 2020, Bilibili announced a strategic investment of HK$513 million in Huanxi Media, the production company founded in 2015 by Dong Ping, Ning Hao, Xu Zheng, and Xiang Shaokun, with a five-year business cooperation agreement. Run for Young, jointly produced by Huanxi Media, Bilibili, and Shanghai Shigu Film, was the first high-profile work after this partnership.² Bilibili's vice chairwoman and COO Li Ni said the company did not take part in production but felt the drama's core matched the platform's temperament, and the company gave it prominent placement, appointment-viewing campaigns, and derivative-content incentives.¹⁰

Style and structure. Zhang Yibai described the drama's core as growth: senior-three students on the point of leaving school must accept the life and problems that no one can avoid, and the show offers the characters' own answers rather than an adult's or a chicken-soup answer. Each episode faces the characters with one problem, such as love, family, poverty, trust, or death, and ends on a set-piece climax that hooks the next episode. Although the footage could have filled more than twenty episodes, Zhang cut it down to sixteen over nearly half a year of editing.¹⁰

Music. The soundtrack included Wang Yuan's "Waltz" (圆舞曲), the first MV released, the Traveler Band's title song, "Yao Wang 2020" (遥望2020) sung by Zhou Xun and Chen Kun as the ending theme, LaLa Hsu's promotion song "Get the Sun," Wu Xuanyi's "Mala Time," You Zhangjing's "If It Were Not You," and "Promised Goodbye" sung by the Feng Quan team. The ending theme was written and composed by Xiao Ke, who had written "Yao Wang 1999" for Zhang Yibai's 1998 drama Jiang Aiqing Jinxing Daodi (将爱情进行到底); Zhou Xun and Chen Kun's duet was their first since they became friends on the 2000 film Xiang Wu Xiang Yu You Xiang Feng.²

Reception

A polarized start that rose. The opening episodes' exaggerated, manga-like, deliberately absurd style divided viewers; some found it refreshing, while others called it awkward and overdone, and some said they were driven away within the first few minutes.¹ The Douban score began around 7.0 to 7.1 and climbed to 7.9, reaching 8.0 by the time of a director interview shortly after the finale.¹² Director Han Yan attributed the early rejection to viewers expecting a more somber tone and meeting exuberant characters in the first scenes, and noted that some raters had not finished a single episode.¹² By the finale on October 22, 2020, the drama had reached 300 million views on Bilibili and had held the top of Bilibili's hot-search list for 24 days.⁴ As of March 7, 2024, it held 8.0 on Douban from 207,385 raters and 8.1 on Bilibili from 100,375.¹

Critical reading. The China News Service commentary described the drama as unwilling to be a polished idol drama: beneath the absurdist shell sits a realist core, with the teenagers carrying the marks of family and society the moment they take off their school uniforms. The same review noted that its realist leanings weakened dramatic tension, and that its handling of class difference and the departure of a major character drew controversy.¹ The Southern Weekend review called it a benchmark drama whose early "chuunibyou" (中二) tone caused the mixed reception, but whose content, once viewers adjusted, drew them into its hot-blooded, painful, and warm portrait of youth.¹³ Wenhui Daily praised its refusal to leave parents absent, and noted that its detailed reconstruction of the era, from Chongqing dialect and history textbooks to four-yuan bowls of Chongqing noodles, led viewers to call it a "limited youth memory of the post-90s."⁷ The scholar Yang Hui placed the drama among recent youth series that have moved beyond campus romance as the genre's fixed center, attending instead to broader psychological needs and individual expression.¹⁴

Legacy

The drama's success carried into film. In 2021, Zhang Yibai and Han Yan directed the youth musical comedy Ran Ye Shaonian de Tiankong (燃野少年的天空), written by Li Zelin from the same source novel, with Peng Yuchang and Zhang Youhao again leading the cast; the film inherited the drama's exuberance and absurdist humor while telling a new story about small-town underdogs.⁵ For Zhang Yibai, who had directed Jiang Aiqing Jinxing Daodi in 1998, a work some call the first mainland Chinese youth idol drama, Run for Young marked a return to youth题材 after two decades and a continuation of his search for how to pass on generational memories of youth.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › East Asian web and streaming serials › Titles My to So

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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