General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Making of Steel (长大成人)

The Making of Steel (长大成人) is a 1997 Chinese drama film written and directed by Lu Xuechang (路学长) as his feature debut, following a Beijing boy named Zhou Qing from adolescence in 1976 into adulthood in the late 1980s as he searches for the worker who became his moral anchor¹. Produced by Beijing Film Studio with the film division of Great Wall International Advertising Company, it was released in mainland China on 18 November 1997 and runs 102 minutes¹^•². The film is regarded as a landmark of China's Sixth Generation directors and was the first film by that new generation of filmmakers to reach commercial cinemas³.

Key fact	Detail
Chinese / English title	长大成人 / The Making of Steel; the working title was 钢铁是这样炼成的 (How Steel Was Tempered)¹^•⁴
Director / writer	Lu Xuechang, his first feature; funding was raised by Tian Zhuangzhuang's Jiguang company¹^•⁵
Release	18 November 1997, mainland China; 102 minutes, Mandarin, color¹
Principal cast	Yin Zongjie and Zhu Hongmo (Zhou Qing as boy and adult), Li Qiang (Ji Wen), Zhu Jie (Shao Ying), Tian Zhuangzhuang (Zhu Helai)¹
Censorship history	Completed in 1995, then roughly three years of review with more than ten rounds of revision before its late-1997 release⁵
Recognition	Nominated for the New Currents Award at the 3rd Busan International Film Festival (1998); among the ten top-grossing domestic films of 1997¹^•⁶
Audience rating	7.9/10 on Douban from 15,649 users (as of 11 December 2025)¹

Spoilers

Plot

The story opens in the summer of 1976 in Beijing. The boy Zhou Qing, whose father has shaved half his head as punishment, runs off with his friend Xiao Mo to a ruined section of the Great Wall, where he picks up a tattered picture-book copy of the Soviet novel How the Steel Was Tempered (钢铁是怎样炼成的)¹. During the earthquake that year he meets the older youth Ji Wen, whose guitar he envies, and Ji Wen's high-school girlfriend Shao Ying, with whom he becomes quietly infatuated⁷.

After the Gang of Four falls, popular music appears on Beijing's streets. Ji Wen, now working in a factory, forms an electric band in which Zhou Qing plays; the band is eventually forced to disband, and Zhou Qing takes a job as a boiler worker at a railway freight yard⁷. There he befriends the train driver Zhu Helai, a sturdy, upright worker who tells him stories of an earlier era and lends him the novel; the hero Pavel's spirit and Zhu Helai's example impress Zhou Qing deeply⁷. When Zhou Qing is struck by a train while racing it with a coal cart and his leg bones are crushed, Zhu Helai donates his own bone for the graft, then leaves for a university in the south and disappears from Zhou Qing's life⁷.

In the late 1980s the adult Zhou Qing, played by Zhu Hongmo, returns to Beijing after studying guitar abroad. The rock scene he finds there leaves the idealist disoriented; bandmates fall into drug use and are arrested, with Xiao Mo made a scapegoat through Ji Wen's maneuvering. Zhou Qing's response is to search for the vanished Zhu Helai, a quest that runs through the film's final movement and ends with an appointment to meet at whatever place Zhu Helai may be found⁷. The character Zhu Helai takes his name from Zhukhrai, the worker-mentor in How the Steel Was Tempered, and in the film he is credited as author of a book titled How Steel Was Actually Tempered (钢铁是这样炼成的)¹.

Production and censorship

Lu Xuechang, born in Beijing in 1964, studied painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts affiliated school, entered the directing department of the Beijing Film Academy in 1985, and joined the Beijing Film Studio directing unit in 1990⁵. He said the story drew on his own experiences and those of his friends, and that he wanted to depict individual fate under enormous social change⁵. In his own words, "it is a naturally flowing work, not a deliberate one," written from his own and his friends' lives⁸.

The film's passage through review became part of its history. In a 2014 interview Lu said the film was submitted for censorship for three years and revised more than ten times; it was finally released in 1997 but was not permitted to enter international film festivals, and it performed well at the domestic box office⁵. A retrospective account in the Berkeley journal Remembrance states that the original ending was judged too gray and pessimistic, amounting to a repudiation of the official image of the revolutionary new person, and that the film underwent three years of major revision and a title change before being permitted to screen⁹. A 2000 Sina profile gives the count of revisions as eight over three years¹⁰. The original title, How Steel Was Tempered, echoed both the Soviet novel and the publicity around Tian Zhuangzhuang's promotion of young directors; Tian also appears in the film as the train driver Zhu Helai⁴.

Place in Sixth Generation cinema

The film occupies a specific position in the group of filmmakers known as the Sixth Generation or "new generation" (新生代), graduates of the Beijing Film Academy who came of age in the 1990s. Lu Xuechang shot the film starting in April 1995 and completed it that year, and scholars read it as a work of integration, an attempt to negotiate between mainstream political culture and commercial culture after years in which these directors circulated at the margins¹¹. One critic cited in a 2025 study argued that had the completed film passed censorship more smoothly and appeared earlier, the overall face of the Sixth Generation and Lu's own career would have looked very different¹².

Thematically, the film opens with the Tangshan earthquake era as the endpoint of one historical period and traces a boy's spiritual development toward a "spiritual father" found in a railway worker named after the hero of How the Steel Was Tempered; its later half, with rock music, drug use, sudden urban violence, and unsteady handheld camerawork, carries the urban experience of Lu's own generation¹¹. A 2025 analysis in Literary and Art Weekly describes the film as told in first person, using Zhou Qing's growth to refract the rapid changes of Chinese society from the 1970s to the early 1990s, and notes a tension in the work: it is rebellious yet attached to mainstream values, calling for the return of a heroic spirit through the interaction of its conscious surface text and unconscious subtext³. A contemporary review put the same idea plainly: the film is about heroism from beginning to end, but without grand scenes or battlefields, only persistence and strength¹³.

The film also belongs to a Beijing-centered current of 1990s filmmaking. A retrospective on Beijing screen culture groups it with Guan Hu's Dirt (头发乱了) as rebellious films whose formal energy drew on Beijing speech and the city's atmosphere, alongside Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace and Feng Xiaogang's work¹⁴. It is likewise counted among the founding or second films of the Sixth Generation, alongside Wang Xiaoshuai's The Days, Lou Ye's Weekend Lover, Zhang Yuan's Beijing Bastards, Jia Zhangke's Xiao Wu, and Zhang Yang's Yesterday, films that used voiceover or titles to frame the story as "our own story"⁸.

Reception and legacy

Commercially, the film was one of the ten top-grossing domestic releases of 1997, and domestic critics called it "the most threatening challenge the new-generation directors have launched at the Fifth Generation"⁶. A film-history survey credits it, alongside In the Heat of the Sun, Red Cherry, and Blush, with expanding the market for domestic films during the 1995 market peak¹⁵. It was later listed in a survey of reform-era Chinese cinema as an early example of the youth-film genre that evolved toward commercial genre filmmaking in the 2000s and 2010s¹⁶.

Its standing among musicians has endured: the painter and musician Peng Lei has called it the most important rock-themed film in his eyes¹⁷. In English-language scholarship the film is cited under the title The Making of Steel, with the note that the Chinese title literally means "coming of age"¹⁸. Lu Xuechang followed it with Very Summer (非常夏日, 1999), which continued the theme of a generation's spiritual development, and later Cala, My Dog! (2002)¹¹.

References

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