Released in 2014, The Alumni of Warfare 1917 (hereafter Alumnus ) occupies a unique niche in modern Chinese cinema: a low-budget war film that prioritizes moral clarity over historical complexity. The narrative follows three friends—Guan Peng, Li Yang, and Zhao Zhi—who graduate from the prestigious Baoding Military Academy and find themselves on opposing sides of China’s fractured civil conflicts. The film uses their loyalty and eventual sacrifice to critique the senselessness of internecine war while celebrating the eternal bonds of the academy.
This paper analyzes Chen Xunqi’s 2014 film The Alumni of Warfare 1917 , which follows graduates of the Baoding Military Academy during the Warlord Era of early 20th-century China. While the film presents itself as a historical action-drama, it functions primarily as a nationalist allegory. This analysis explores the film’s romanticization of military brotherhood, its dramatic liberties with Republican-era history, and its use of hyper-stylized violence to construct an idealized “warrior-scholar” archetype. The paper concludes that the film reflects contemporary Chinese anxieties about national unity and military virtue more than it accurately depicts 1917 warfare. warfare 1917 alumnus
Critically, the film’s pacing is uneven: the first half focuses on academy camaraderie (training, drinking, rivalries), while the second half becomes a relentless sequence of ambushes and last stands. This structure emphasizes that the “alumnus” identity is forged in peacetime but only proven in death. Released in 2014, The Alumni of Warfare 1917