Hunan boy Zhu escapes from local tyrants chase, joins the Hunan troop and gets promoted soon. The superior recommends Zhu to the military school where he meets undercover CCP Cheng Kang. Zhu participates in the Northern Expedition after graduation and joins CCP later.

Brings viewers into a small Chinese city and inspires familiarity with the rhythms of everyday existence, with people's dreams, shortcomings and illusions in a way that is universal.

Dongdong reluctantly follows in his father Song's footsteps, learning to be a fisherman. On Christmas Eve, he asks his father for a new pair of sneakers, but Song denies him, as they can barely survive on their fishing business. Disappointed by the harsh reality, Dongdong disappears.

With the birth of New China, a husband-and-wife pair of Overseas Chinese painters resolve to return to the embrace of their motherland, and their child is born under the five-starred red flag. But these Overseas Chinese patriots are persecuted in various political campaigns and their daughter subject to discrimination from childhood. The male lead freezes to death as a fugitive and draws a giant question mark in the snow before dying. The daughter emigrates following the Cultural Revolution; when her relatives try to stop her, she says: "You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?" Based on a script by Bai Hua, SUN AND MAN was completed in 1981 but permanently shelved following high-level criticism and a public campaign against its "anti-Party" character. The film is said to survive in the studio archive but has never been publicly screened. A Taiwanese adaptation of the script (with some modifications) was released in 1982 under the English title PORTRAIT OF A FANATIC.