General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Troubleshooters (顽主)

The Troubleshooters (顽主) is a 1988 Chinese comedy film directed by Mi Jiashan (米家山) and adapted from Wang Shuo's (王朔) novel of the same title, produced by Emei Film Studio. It follows three unemployed young men in Beijing who open the "3T Company," a service that handles other people's troubles, and it is widely regarded as a landmark of Chinese urban comedy.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Chinese title / English title	顽主 / The Troubleshooters (also rendered The Trouble-shooters)¹
Director and writers	Directed by Mi Jiashan; screenplay by Mi Jiashan and Wang Shuo, from Wang Shuo's novel¹
Production	Emei Film Studio, mainland China; Mandarin dialogue; comedy with urban subject matter³
Principal cast	Zhang Guoli as Yu Guan, Ge You as Yang Chong, Liang Tian as Ma Qing, Pan Hong, and Ma Xiaoqing²
Release and length	Released in China in 1988; runtime listed as 100 minutes by 1905.com and FIRST, and 110 minutes by M+, Baidu, and other databases¹^•⁴
Awards	Six Golden Rooster Award nominations in 1989, including Best Feature Film and Best Director, with no wins⁵
Commercial record	83 prints sold on release, a middle-to-upper market result; cumulative box office recorded at 59,000 yuan as of June 2024⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Yu Guan (于观, Zhang Guoli), Yang Chong (杨重, Ge You), and Ma Qing (马青, Liang Tian) are three jobless young men in Beijing who open the "3T Company," offering to "relieve worries, solve difficulties, and take blame for others" (替人排忧、替人解难、替人受过). Business arrives in a rush: Yang Chong is hired to keep a doctor's girlfriend Liu Meiping company, Ma Qing argues on a client's behalf with the client's wife, and manager Yu Guan receives the self-styled "writer" Bao Kang, who claims his work deserves a prize.²

The assignments then go wrong in escalating ways. Liu Meiping develops feelings for Yang Chong; the awards ceremony staged for Bao Kang requires recruiting strangers from a shopping mall to play celebrity presenters; a client who fears his girlfriend will cry at a breakup discovers she is Liu Meiping; and the company's care for a seriously ill old woman ends with her relatives suing it in court. The 3T Company is ordered to suspend operations, and the relatives sit in its business office demanding compensation.²

Origin of the project

Wang Shuo's novella appeared in the literary magazine Shouhuo (《收获》). When the editors accepted the story, only the title needed changing, and Wang Shuo offered four alternatives in his reply: "Maomaochong" (毛毛虫), "Wanzhu" (顽主), "Xiaoren" (小人), and "3T Company" (三"T"公司); the magazine chose Wanzhu.⁷

Mi Jiashan, a 1947-born director who had studied in the directing program at the Beijing Film Academy from 1983 and returned to Emei Film Studio in 1985, read the story in Shouhuo in 1987 and described it as finding an outlet for satire and mockery of social pressures.²^•⁷ The studio's artistic committee doubted the material, since the novel has no single plotline or typical protagonist, but Emei was in financial difficulty, and Mi Jiashan proposed an unusual arrangement to get the film made.⁷

The director contract. Mi Jiashan signed a director responsibility contract with the studio, undertaking to return 50 percent profit; under its terms, failure would cost him two years of wages and two years without directing. The planned budget was 600,000 yuan, which overran by 200,000, and the film ultimately earned a little over 1.1 million yuan, missing the target; Mi Jiashan asked the studio to apply the penalty, but after the film won acclaim and awards and brought Emei public standing, his back pay was restored.⁸ M+ credits the film with pioneering this contracting model for directors at the state-owned studio.⁴

Adaptation from the novel

Wang Shuo's own text could not fill a feature: while Mi Jiashan collected the screenplay, he found that Wang Shuo had cut passages from the magazine version and pasted them onto manuscript paper interspersed with handwritten text to save writing time, so the director had to do substantial second creation.⁶ The film also changed details: the company's stated services in the novel, "solving difficulties, relieving boredom, taking blame," became "relieving worries, solving difficulties, taking blame" in the film.⁹

The most celebrated addition is the fashion show sequence, which does not exist in the novel: ten tall models walk the runway while a three-year-old child in an imperial dragon robe plays among their legs, and landowners, Kuomintang officials, old-style peasants, emperors and generals, May Fourth youth, and Red Guards appear together in a final carnival. Critics have called the sequence a classic of Chinese film visual history, alongside the director's documentary-style capture of Beijing street scenes in the summer of 1988.¹⁰ The film also folds in rock music, disco dancing, broadcast slogans, and street noise, recording the city at a moment of cultural upheaval.⁹

Censorship and reception

The film drew sharply different responses from three audiences. The censors objected to its strong mocking tone, coarse language, and damage to traditionally positive character types, and requested changes to six details, but because the film tested with excellent theatrical effect and promised economic returns, it was passed.⁵ Intellectual critics attacked it almost uniformly in journals such as Film Art, calling the wanzhu figures pathological products of a sick society whose value nihilism was dangerous. Ordinary audiences, chiefly students and city residents, welcomed it as authentic and satisfying, and it sold 83 prints, a middle-to-upper commercial result.⁵

At the 9th Golden Rooster Awards in 1989 the film received six nominations, including Best Feature Film, Best Director for Mi Jiashan, Best Actor for Ge You, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actress for Ma Xiaoqing, and Best Recording, and won none of them.⁵^•⁶

The "Wang Shuo year" and legacy

1988 saw four Wang Shuo adaptations in production: The Troubleshooters, Samsara (轮回), Big Breathing (大喘气), and Half is Flame, Half is Seawater (一半是海水一半是火焰). Mi Jiashan himself coined the label "Wang Shuo year" (王朔年) for it, and the general later consensus was that The Troubleshooters came closest to the spirit of the original. Wang Shuo attributed this to the other directors' large-scale changes, saying that Mi Jiashan "just shot it according to the novel," an assessment commentators consider unfair given the film's many alterations and visual inventions.¹⁰ Wang Shuo repeatedly named The Troubleshooters as the screen adaptation of his work with which he was most satisfied.¹¹

The film's afterlife has been substantial. M+ describes it as a groundbreaking work of contemporary Chinese comedy and notes that it inspired Feng Xiaogang's 2013 comedy Personal Tailor, which explicitly acknowledged the debt; Feng Xiaogang specially thanked Mi Jiashan when that film opened.⁴^•⁸ Scholars have also traced its rebellious, deconstructive humor into the independent cinema of the 1990s, and the film marked the screen debut trajectory of Ge You, then an unknown whose fee for the picture was 800 yuan.⁵^•⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Satirical, black, and parody comedies of the 1980s

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

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