Thunderstorm I

In 1920s China, society was deeply unsettled, caught between colonial domination and feudalism. Imperialist powers held sway over the coastal cities, national capitalism struggled to develop in the cracks, and feudal ideas remained deeply entrenched. As an important northern treaty port, Tianjin became a crossroads for old and new ideas and class conflicts. The Zhou family mansion, home to a local bourgeois family, was a microcosm of the era: on the surface, it maintained the authority of a feudal patriarch, but beneath that facade, the original sin of capital accumulation, the shackles of feudal ethics, and the clash between old and new ideas were brewing irreconcilable tensions.