General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Founding of an Army (建军大业)

The Founding of an Army (建军大业) is a 2017 Chinese historical drama directed by Andrew Lau (刘伟强) that dramatizes the founding of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, from the April 12 counter-revolutionary coup of 1927 through the Nanchang Uprising of 1 August 1927 to the meeting of Mao Zedong and Zhu De at Jinggangshan¹. It is the third and final installment of the "founding trilogy" (建国三部曲) that began with The Founding of a Republic (2009) and Beginning of the Great Revival (2011), and it was produced as a tribute film for the 90th anniversary of the army's founding².

Key fact	Detail
Release	27 July 2017, mainland China; 133 minutes; Mandarin; drama/history¹
Director and producers	Directed by Andrew Lau; Han Sanping as chief planner and artistic director, Huang Jianxin as producer³
Lead cast	Liu Ye (Mao Zedong), Zhu Yawen (Zhou Enlai), Huang Zhizhong (Zhu De), Wang Jingchun (He Long), Ou Hao (Ye Ting)¹
Historical span	April 12 coup of 1927, in which about 310,000 people were killed, to the Nanchang Uprising, Sanheba battle, Autumn Harvest Uprising, and the Jinggangshan meeting¹
Production scale	Filming from 1 August to 25 November 2016; about 60 scenes across roughly ten provinces; 25,000 extras⁴^•⁵
Audience satisfaction	88.8 points on 28 July 2017, 22 hours after release, described as the highest score in the history of the Chinese film audience satisfaction survey⁶
Box office	About 4.1 (hundred million yuan) as of April 2024⁷

Spoilers

Story

The film opens in 1927, when the Northern Expedition had just achieved major results and the right wing of the Kuomintang turned on its Communist allies in the "party-clearing" purge; in a few months, close to 310,000 people were killed, and the Chinese Communist Party, founded less than seven years earlier and without an army of its own, was nearly destroyed¹. From this defeat, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai draw the lesson that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and they go separately to Hunan and Nanchang to join Zhu De, He Long, Ye Ting, and Liu Bocheng in launching an uprising to build an army under the party's own command¹.

The narrative is built as a chain of events rather than a single battle scene. Scholar Wang Yichun describes the film as reconstructing the "first shot" of the Nanchang Uprising by embedding it in a wide event chain: the conspiracy and bloodshed of the April 12 coup, the debates of the party center, the southern march and the Sanheba battle, the origins of the Autumn Harvest Uprising led by Mao, and the meeting at the Jinggangshan base⁸. A review in Jiemian similarly notes that the film uses Zhou Enlai as its central figure to link the April 12 coup, the Nanchang Uprising, and the failed southern advance, closing with the Jinggangshan meeting⁹.

Production

The project originated around 2013, when the city of Nanchang first approached Han Sanping about a film centered on the uprising; Han advised timing production for 2016 so that release would coincide with the army's 90th anniversary in 2017¹⁰. Bona Film Group's Yu Dong later assembled the project, bringing in Han Sanping and Huang Jianxin, and proposed Andrew Lau as director¹⁰. Lau, known for the Young and Dangerous and Infernal Affairs series, had never made a film of this type; he read through materials on the founding period for about a year and a half before shooting¹¹^•¹².

Filming began on 1 August 2016, the army's anniversary, and wrapped on 25 November 2016⁴. The shoot lasted about four and a half months, the longest of Lau's career, with the crew moving across nearly ten provinces and about 60 settings including the Du residence in Shanghai, Dufudi in Wuhan, and the Niuxing railway station in Nanchang¹¹^•⁴. Some 25,000 extras took part, and the major battle sequences for the Nanchang Uprising and Sanheba alone were filmed over more than 60 days, about half the shooting schedule⁵. In the finished film, war footage accounts for close to 40 percent of the running time⁴.

Battle staging. The Nanchang Uprising sequence used nearly 3,000 shots and 11 camera positions, including cranes, aerial drones, and GoPro cameras, and flames from explosions rose about ten meters⁴. For the Sanheba battle, Lau set a record of 200 explosion points in a single shot⁴. Because the cast members were busy stars with scattered scenes, Lau organized a team of more than 100 rehearsal actors, including real veterans, to run through every scene's choreography and blast points before filming¹¹. Producer Huang Jianxin said the script alone was polished for two years, and that every actor did background reading and professional military training before joining the crew¹³.

Casting and the "young faces" debate

Unlike the first two trilogy films, which assembled more than a hundred established stars, The Founding of an Army cast a large share of popular young actors, on the reasoning that the historical figures were themselves young at the time; each character's age is shown on screen, such as Su Yu, played by Liu Haoran, at 19³^•¹¹. Liu Ye reprised his role as Mao Zedong from Beginning of the Great Revival, with Zhu Yawen as Zhou Enlai, Yu Hewei as Chen Duxiu, Ou Hao as Ye Ting, and Ma Yili as Xiang Jingyu².

The casting drew public criticism before release. Ye Daying, a director and grandson of Ye Ting, said he could not accept the young actor Ou Hao playing his grandfather, and accused the filmmakers of profiting from a major historical event¹³^•¹⁴. At a seminar held by the China Film Archive, scholars defended the choice: Zhao Weifang of the Chinese Academy of Arts argued that if casting popular young actors improved audience acceptance of a mainstream film, it was on balance a benefit, and that any weak performances could be addressed at the level of script and direction¹³. Commentators also noted the film's fictional additions, such as the Nationalist officer Chen Feng played by Zhou Yiwei in the Nanchang sequence, introduced at Lau's insistence¹⁰.

Reception and significance

At a preview screening for more than 130 cinema-chain representatives on 17 July 2017, the film received high marks, and the China Film Art Research Center's summer survey recorded a satisfaction score of 88.8 on 28 July, described as a record for the survey¹⁵^•⁶. Some experts compared it with earlier films on the same subject, Nanchang Uprising (1981) and August 1st (2007), and judged it a more complete account of the founding of the party's army¹⁵.

Critics identified the film as a step in the commercialization of Chinese mainstream cinema. At the China Film Archive seminar, professor Wu Guanping of the Beijing Film Academy said the film "re-translates" familiar historical and political language for a commercial context, and professor Suo Yabin of Communication University of China noted that among the three trilogy films it had the most complete narrative, and that its use of young idol actors gave them mainstream legitimacy¹⁶. A more critical Jiemian essay argued that the film recodes revolutionary history into a youth film, presenting a "de-politicized, de-revolutionized, de-classed" narrative in which the deaths of soldiers on both sides are honored in a humanist register rather than an ideological one¹⁴.

Commercially, the film earned about 4.1 (hundred million yuan) at the box office as of April 2024, well below the trilogy's first installment The Founding of a Republic at 4.2 and far below contemporary hits such as Wolf Warrior 2⁷. An IMAX version was also released¹⁷.

References

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