The Knockout: How a Fishmonger Goes Bad, One Small Step at a Time

Why this one

A man sells fish from a stall. Twenty years later he chairs a construction group, sits on a local political advisory body and leads the Jinghai underworld. The Knockout (狂飙, Kuangbiao) is the story of that distance, and the thread running through it is one idea: going bad is not a single decision but a series of small steps, each of which looks, at the moment it is taken, like there was no other choice.

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The drama premiered on 14 January 2023 on CCTV-8 and the streaming site iQIYI (爱奇艺) and ran 39 episodes of about 45 minutes. It was directed by Xu Jizhou (徐纪周), who wrote it with Zhu Junyi (朱俊懿). A novel version of the script has also been published. Set in the fictional city of Jinghai (京海), the drama takes place against China's campaign against organised crime, known as saohei chu'e (扫黑除恶, "sweep away gangs and eliminate evil").

The setup

The story opens in 2000. Gao Qiqiang (高启强) is a fishmonger with a market stall, bullied by local gangsters. His parents died early, and he is the elder brother of Gao Qisheng (高启盛) and Gao Qilan (高启兰). In the same year he crosses paths with An Xin (安欣), a young police officer in Jinghai and the foster son of a senior police official. Their relationship, across two decades, is the spine of the show.

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The closing stretch is set in 2021, when a project team is formed to investigate Gao's company, Qiangsheng Group (强盛集团).

An Xin and Gao Qiqiang: two mirror images

The clearest way to see the structure is through two career paths. One man never stops changing. The other never changes.

Gao Qiqiang's path goes up. In 2000 he owns a fish stall and becomes a partner in a small mobile-phone shop. He then takes a powerful older man, Chen Tai (陈泰, "Uncle Tai"), as his godfather and joins Uncle Tai's Jinghai Construction Engineering Group. He is its general manager by 2004 and its chairman by 2006, the year he marries Chen Shuting (陈书婷), a widow with a young son. By 2021 he is chairman of Qiangsheng Group and a member of the city's Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a consultative body of local figures. To most people in town he is a businessman known for philanthropy. His methods are coercion, murder and bribery.

An Xin's path goes sideways. He starts at a local police station, moves to the criminal investigation detachment, and in 2006 leads a team there. By 2008 he is in the archives section, and by 2021 in the publicity section, before he joins the project team that takes up the Qiangsheng case. He is an incorruptible policeman, and he spends twenty years trying to make a case that his postings do not help him make.

Gao's position keeps improving, and he keeps becoming someone new. An Xin's position does not improve, and he stays the person he was in 2000. Each rung on Gao's ladder has a person attached: a protector, a partner, a marriage. A career summary cannot say why each step was taken. The drama does that, scene by scene, and it keeps the two men in each other's line of sight throughout, so the contrast never has time to go abstract.

Not every viewer accepted the framing. At the finale, a viewer interviewed by Jimu News (极目新闻) and quoted by the National Business Daily (每日经济新闻) said Gao's rise read more like a power fantasy in which the lead can do anything, and pointed to logical weak spots in the route. The sympathy the show builds is real; so is the argument over whether it has earned it.

2000, 2006, 2021: when the people and the city change together

The drama jumps forward in stages, and the dates are worth keeping in mind. Its main points are 2000, 2006 and 2021, with a further stop in 2014; the year 2008 appears in some characters' career histories. At each stop the people change, and so does the city around them.

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Take the officials. Zhao Lidong (赵立冬) is a member of the municipal Party standing committee in charge of political and legal affairs in 2000, executive vice mayor in 2006 and mayor in 2021. Meng Dehai (孟德海), played by Zhang Zhijian (张志坚), is deputy mayor and head of the public security bureau in 2000 and chair of the municipal People's Congress standing committee by 2021. Gao's business moves up through the same decades. In 2014, Yang Jian (杨健), who marries Meng Dehai's daughter Meng Yu that year, becomes deputy director of the power supply bureau with Gao's support. The point of the time jumps is that nobody in Jinghai changes alone.

2000 is the era of the fish stall and the first encounter with An Xin. By 2006 Gao has the company and the marriage. In 2021 the story arrives at the project team, with the characters twenty years older and the city's institutions bound up with the people who run them.

Zhang Songwen at 46

Zhang Songwen (张颂文), who plays Gao, was not a household name before this drama. Born on 10 May 1976, he was 46 when it aired in January and February 2023, and turned 47 in May that year. He worked as a tour guide in Guangdong in the 1990s, then went to Beijing to study acting at the Beijing Film Academy. After graduating he stayed on there as a teaching assistant, left in 2008 to open his own acting studio and spent years as an acting coach. He had film and television parts along the way, including a first lead in a Cantonese sitcom in 2005, but his breakout came with The Knockout.

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His Gao is the centre of the sympathy question, and the drama is built so that the early fishmonger and the later chairman have to be played by the same man across twenty years. At the 28th Magnolia Awards (白玉兰奖), the main television prize in Shanghai, Zhang Songwen was not nominated for anything; he attended the ceremony as a presenter.

A reference point: Breaking Bad

For readers who know Breaking Bad, the comparison suggests itself: an ordinary man, a slow corruption, a criminal empire. This is our own reading, not a critic's. Where the two match: both follow a man from a modest job to a position of criminal power, and both make the viewer watch the steps rather than the destination. Where they part: The Knockout spans twenty years and a whole city, where Breaking Bad stays close to one household over a much shorter period. In Breaking Bad the investigator, Hank, is a supporting figure; here An Xin is a co-lead and the show's moral measure. And where the Breaking Bad hero is driven by what he wants, The Knockout keeps showing Gao's steps as responses to whoever is standing next to him. Roughly, one asks what a man wants when he turns, the other what the people around him make of him.

Cast and crew

• Zhang Yi (张译) as An Xin

• Zhang Songwen as Gao Qiqiang

• Li Yitong (李一桐) as Meng Yu (孟钰), a university student in 2000 who later becomes a journalist

• Zhang Zhijian as Meng Dehai, Meng Yu's father

• Wu Gang (吴刚) as Xu Zhong (徐忠), a provincial official heading the crackdown

• Ni Dahong (倪大红) as Chen Tai

• Gao Ye (高叶) as Chen Shuting, Chen Tai's adopted daughter and later Gao's wife

• Li Jian (李健) as Li Xiang (李响), a police officer and An Xin's colleague

• Su Xiaoding (苏小玎) as Gao Qisheng and Cheng Longni (程隆妮) as Gao Qilan

Most of the shooting took place in Jiangmen (江门), in Guangdong province, starting in October 2021.

How it was received

The National Business Daily reported on 28 January 2023 that more than 120,000 people had rated the drama on Douban (豆瓣), China's main user-review site, with an average of 9.0 and 59.2 per cent giving full marks. A People's Daily website report carried on 31 January put it at 9.1; by the finale on 1 February it had settled back to 9.0.

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One side effect shows how widely it travelled. In episode 4, An Xin tells Gao to read Sun Tzu's The Art of War (孙子兵法). By 31 January, Beijing Daily (北京日报) reported that the Zhonghua Book Company edition had reached the top of the JD.com and Dangdang bestseller lists for classical texts and had sold out; a Chengdu Business Daily report carried on the People's Daily website said the publisher had reprinted tens of thousands of copies.

At the Magnolia Awards the drama was nominated for Best Chinese TV Drama, Xu Jizhou for Best Director and Zhang Yi for Best Actor. It won none of the three.

Where to watch

In China the drama is on iQIYI, and it was shown on CCTV-8. Outside China, availability varies by region and changes over time; check what is offered where you are and whether English subtitles are included.

Who it suits

It suits viewers who like a long crime story told through character and institutions rather than twists, and who are comfortable following a protagonist they are not sure they should like. The early episodes set out the pressures on Gao slowly, and later episodes return to them.