[4] When he was still an infant, his family's business interests necessitated a move to Tianjin where his father worked for a time as secretary to China's president, Li Yuanhong.

The school maintained a society of dramatic arts in which the students produced western works, notably those of Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill, who were well-known authors in China thanks to translations published by Hu Shih.

While works of Chinese playwrights previous to Cao Yu are of fundamentally historical interest and were famed in China, they garnered little critical success or popularity on the international stage.

The plot of Thunderstorm centers on one family's psychological and physical destruction as a result of incest, as perpetrated at the hands of its morally depraved and corrupt patriarch, Zhou Puyuan.

In Cao Yu's second play, Sunrise, published in 1936, he continues his thematic treatment of the progressive moral degradation of individuals in the face of a hostile society.

In the play, the history of several Shanghai women are narrated; their stories show their lives disintegrating in response to lack of affection and of acknowledgment by the society surrounding them, leading them down a tragic path from which they cannot escape.

By centring upon the female characters, Cao Yu introduced feminism ideas and included the early enlightenment of women's liberation in his works.

Set in Peking (today Beijing) as its name implies, and in the then present, surprisingly the work does not allude to the war with Japan at all, but chronicles the history of a well-heeled family that is incapable of surviving and adapting to social changes which are destroying the traditional world and culture in which they live.

The title of the work is an allusion to the so-called Peking Man, the proto-human who inhabited the north of China several hundred thousand years ago.

Cao Yu's recurrent themes are present, emphasizing the inability of traditional families to adapt themselves to modern society and its customs and ways.

During his tenure in Chongqing, Cao Yu taught classes in the city's School of Dramatic Art and completed a translation into Chinese of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in 1948.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Cao Yu became the director of the Popular Theater Art League, a post he held for the rest of his life.

Thereafter, in 1961, the decade of his major public recognition, he published Courage and the Sword (膽劍篇 / 胆剑篇 Dan jian pian), his first historical drama.

This work, although set at the end of the Zhou dynasty during the Warring States period, contains pronounced allusions to the defeat of Mao's political ideology as embodied in his Great Leap Forward.