Cao Yu's plays stood head and shoulders above the Chinese theatrical circles at the initial stage of the development of modern Chinese drama. Several of his masterpieces were obviously influenced by western plays. Sunrise, the only one which Cao Yu acknowledged in black and white that he was conscious of being receptively influenced by the Russian literary master Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Cao Yu versed in the features of Chekhov's plays: on one hand, he claimed to learn from the creative methods of The Three Sisters; on the other hand, he departed from the realistic creativity of The Three Sisters. Sunrise had its own creative intention palpably different from the realism requirements. This paper starts with a discussion of Cao Yu's turn of his perspective on dramatic aesthetics when he created Sunrise. It elaborates the reason why Cao Yu made a dramatic aesthetic turn with new perspectives, and his artistic comprehension of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Furthermore, it depicts three variables including Cao Yu's personal care and attention to the common people's secular tastes, creative subject's vigorous emotional intervention, and the left-wing ideology, comparing with Chekhov's ideas of creation and the creative achievement of The Three Sisters to elucidate the significant deviation of Sunrise's referring to The Three Sisters. Finally, it concludes with the problem of creative intention observed by the comparative study of the above two plays to analyze the collective karma of that era - he painted a tiger but it turned out a dog - presented in Cao Yu's Sunrise on the level of dramatic art.