The Spirit of the Drum

First part of the Decisive Engagement trilogy. Directed by Pingfen Li et al.

Winner of the Golden Rooster Award for Best Film in 2002

The year is 1927 and the Alliance moves triumphantly from victory to victory in an epic and bloody civil war campaign against the uprisings of brutal warlords and feudal barons that has left the country on the brink of total collapse. With the nation's fate hanging in the balance, a rebel revolt in the stronghold city of Nanchang threatens to give the insurgents the upper hand and as the first day of August dawns the Alliance, led by some of the bravest soldiers and greatest tacticians the world has ever seen, face their deadliest and most monumental battle yet.

In the later stage of the Liberation War, with the victory of the three major battles over, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao Zedong made strategic decisions, ordering Liu Bocheng (played by Fu Xuecheng) and Deng Xiaoping (played by Lu Qi) to lead a group of the Second Field and Fourth Field to advance towards Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou, and Sichuan, and annihilate the remaining enemies in the southwest. On his way south, Deng Xiaoping asked railway experts he met about the construction of the Chengdu Chongqing Railway and gave political education classes to the troops heading south in a timely manner, implementing Chairman Mao's great teachings of "carrying out the revolution to the end"...

This drama describes the life of Peng Dehuai (1898-1974), one of the Ten Marshals of the People's Republic of China.