In 1948, four young girls, daughters of Shanghai's elite, attending college in America find themselves unable to return after the Communists take Shanghai.
In the winter of 1948, the Huaihai battlefield. The telephone operator Yuxiang (played by Huang Xiaolei) rescued the rural girl Yuxiang (played by Li Xiuming) who was about to hang herself during the mission. Yuxiang has nothing to do with her, and she is willing to accept her personally and tell her sufferings of being homeless.
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.
The government sends caravans to Miao villages periodically to provide goods which facilitate the folks. A detachment protects the caravans from robbery.
