TV series revisits CPC's early history

A highlighted project to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of Communist Party of China, the 30-episode TV drama Zhong Liu Ji Shui (Swim Against the Current), has recently began its run on China Central Television's flagship channel CCTV-1 as well as multiple streaming sites.

Set between 1919 and 1928, the drama, which is named after a line of a poem penned by Chairman Mao, chronicles the Party's early history, revisiting milestone moments ranging from the May Fourth Movement in 1919,which exerted decisive influence upon the founding of the Party, to the 1928 Jinggang Forces' Meeting, which saw two armies respectively led by Mao Zedong, and Zhu De alongside Chen Yi to join forces on Jinggang Mountain in Jiangxi province, fostering the expansion of the Party-led revolutionary base in the countryside.

The crew, who began shooting the production on Dec 5, traveled to many areas in the four provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Guangdong and Hunan, filming in more than 1,000 settings with up to over 280 people as the major cast members and more than 20,000 extras, said the producers during a symposium held in Beijing on June 1.

Director Song Yemning said the key for the TV series is to explore why Communist Party in China chose Marxism as the theory to guide their revolutionary striving, and how Mao Zedong combined Marxist theory with China's specific reality, during the Beijing event.

Currently, the series has made a splash online, exemplified by the TV program popularity tracer CSM's statistics showing that each of its released episodes has reached 3.32 percent of all Chinese audience members on average, much higher than the 1 percent threshold to define a popular work.