General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Dance of the Storm (风暴舞)

The Dance of the Storm (风暴舞) is a 2021 Chinese urban spy drama directed by Liu Xin, led by William Chan (陈伟霆) and Gulnazar (古力娜扎), and co-starring Guo Jiahao, Song Yanfei, Ren Dahua, and Jiang Wenli¹. Produced by Ciwen Media, iQiyi, and Manmei Film & TV, it follows young information-security agents protecting a network-security device from a criminal organization². Filmed in 2018 and released on April 25, 2021 on iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku, it was positioned as the first Chinese drama in the "urban spy" genre, combining modern action-agent conventions with a domestic setting³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Genre and premise	Urban spy drama about information-security agents at the firm Moshi defending the VX3 network-security device from the organization "Scorpio"²^•⁵
Director and leads	Directed by Liu Xin; William Chan as Li Junjie, Gulnazar as Zhou Xuan, Guo Jiahao as Shi Yunhao, with Ren Dahua and Jiang Wenli in featured roles¹
Production window	Launch event May 9, 2018 in Beijing; filming wrapped October 8, 2018 after about five months³^•⁶
Broadcast	Premiered April 25, 2021 simultaneously on iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku³
Production scale	503 cast and crew members, 20 cars destroyed, and 472 screens used during filming⁶
Audience profile	Male viewers made up 57% of the audience according to Baidu data, unusual for a Chinese drama⁵
Follow-up	A spin-off network film, Storm Dance: The Game Changer (风暴舞之破局者), was in post-production for iQiyi as of 2021⁷

Spoilers

Plot

The story centers on Li Junjie (William Chan), whose parents, both top scientists, died in an accident in Bincheng when he was 12. Sent back to his hometown of Chonghai, he grew up in an orphanage, where he befriended Shi Yunhao (Guo Jiahao). The two later met Chen Gang, a mentor figure who brought them into Moshi, a security-intelligence agency. At Moshi's training camp they met Zhou Xuan (Gulnazar), who fell for Li Junjie while Shi Yunhao quietly withdrew⁸.

During a mission, Li Junjie's impulsiveness causes Chen Gang's accidental death. Investigating it, he discovers a mole inside the company and traces a conspiracy to an organization code-named "Scorpio" (天蝎), which seeks to steal the VX3 network-security device as a hacking weapon, a threat to national information security. With help from Shi Yunhao and Zhou Xuan, he exposes the plot and, over the course of the story, learns to control his emotions and takes on responsibility for guarding national information security².

The serial narrative layers successive revelations: as one viewer put it, "the first truth is barely uncovered when the second false appearance follows," and the multi-threaded structure was noted by critics as demanding from audiences⁹^•⁵.

Development and production

Screenwriter An Zhiyong began writing at the end of 2016 and finished a first draft in the summer of 2017. Ciwen Media, encouraged by the market success of innovative dramas such as Princess Agents, wanted to make a modern version of the spy drama, a genre until then associated with Republican-era settings. Director Liu Xin read the script, liked it, and passed it to William Chan, with whom he had just made Orange Red Age; Chan was drawn to the distinctive character of Li Junjie. Gulnazar joined because the female agent role differed from her previous parts. After the director and leads came aboard, the script went through another revision⁴.

Chief producer Gao Feng said the initial inspiration was the Korean drama IRIS (2009), and that the team wanted to push the genre toward an extreme, fully fictionalized (架空) setting. The original script was, in his words, much more "far out" than the finished show; after several rounds of weighing and adjustment, the creators settled on a non-political agent story told from a small-figure perspective, comparable to the Korean series Vagabond. He argued that without a fictional setting there would be little dramatic room, since real Chinese security personnel could not plausibly fight, blow things up, or chase cars in the street¹⁰.

Production scale. Filming ran from May to October 2018. The production reported 503 cast and crew, 20 destroyed vehicles, and 472 screens used on camera⁶. The team scouted and shot in multiple countries and regions during preparation, and spent at the level of "two big costume dramas or ten small sweet dramas" to build main sets and stage the action set pieces; even the fingerprint locks inside Moshi required real input from the actors⁵. Producer Chen Tong described the aim as infusing film techniques into television, pursuing film-like pacing, cinematography, and expressive use of costume, makeup, and production design¹¹.

Broadcast and performance

The drama premiered on April 25, 2021 on iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku, three years after it wrapped³. Over its 32-day run it reached first place at some point on the Guduo drama chart, Maoyan all-network heat chart, Yunhe effective-play market-share chart, Vlinkage web-drama index, and Youku's urban-romance heat chart. Within two weeks of launch it took the iQiyi-Maoyan web-drama heat crown five times, with heat above 6,000, and it topped the iQiyi web-drama chart for 7 days while staying in the top three otherwise⁵. It made five appearances on the main hot-search list and sixteen on its entertainment chart⁵.

Baidu data put the male share of the audience at 57%, consistent with the show's male-oriented mix of fights, car crashes, and explosions rather than romance as the main draw⁵. When Ren Dahua's character Mou Chuan was written out, the hashtag #风暴舞意难平# approached nine million reads⁵.

Reception

Response was divided. Some viewers praised its TVB-style crime procedural feel and film-like cinematography; others criticized its dramatic logic, narrative pacing, and the lead actors' performances. Commentators described the show as caught in a debate over what a good contemporary spy drama should be, given that the genre's canonical models, such as Lurk and Kite, are period pieces¹⁰.

A Pengpai News review argued that the fictionalized setting and the three-year delay between completion and broadcast hurt the show: the dubbing did not match the actors' lip movements in places, and the plot's treatment of information security felt taken for granted, so the fight scenes, though intense, did not generate real tension. The same review stressed that the drama was genuinely well funded and carefully made, and that its ambition and execution simply diverged¹.

A review in the Wenhui Bao literary supplement, written by an associate researcher at the Chinese National Academy of Arts, criticized the drama for treating the urban-spy genre as a vehicle for romance and spectacle rather than for national-security education, arguing that unlike the earlier contemporary spy drama Storm's Eye, it did not make viewers feel that security threats are nearby, and that this forfeited the genre's social function¹².

Mainstream outlets were more positive. The overseas edition of People's Daily highlighted the drama's focus on modern information security and its ensemble of young agents as a way of drawing audiences to an unfamiliar subject², and Guangming Online praised it for widening the boundaries of the genre with its network-security and high-tech-crime backdrop¹³.

Legacy

As the first Chinese drama built explicitly around the urban-spy formula, The Dance of the Storm served as a test case for the genre. Industry commentary after its run framed its innovations, a fictional city setting, an underdog agent hero raised in an orphanage rather than a police academy, and a blend of American-style action with local content, as a usable map of both the successes and the pitfalls of the "Chinese-style agent drama," particularly the need to balance realism with spectacle under censorship constraints⁵. Ciwen Media's 2021 business report listed a spin-off network film, Storm Dance: The Game Changer, in post-production for iQiyi⁷.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026