Accompanying her husband on an official visit to South Korea in July 2014, China’s First Lady
Peng Liyuan mentioned to her host that Chinese President Xi Jinping looked a lot like the
protagonist Doo Min-joon (Kim Soo-hyun) in the popular Korean drama My Love from the
Star, sweeping across Asia in 2013–2014.^1 Peng’s comparison between the two leading men,
innocuous and complimentary though it seemed, generated intense media interest and testified
to the far-reaching “soft power” of TV drama in the game of diplomacy.^2 Popular shows have
become a form of Asian cultural currency, a lingua franca where the plot and cast circulate in
everyday vocabulary.
My Love from the Star was not the only TV series shaking up Asia’s mediascape in 2013–2014.
A Japanese banking drama Hanzawa Naoki (2013) sent cultural shock waves through Japan,
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and China with its bold condemnation of exploitative corporate
culture, striking a chord with salarymen feeling oppressed by their bosses.^3 The show’s finale
pulled in a record-setting 42.2 percent of viewers in Japan and popularized catchphrases such as
baigaeshi (“double payback your enemy”) in an inspirational, revenge-driven lexicon.^4 Hanzawa
Naoki brings out the Freudian concept of the “return of the repressed” in an Asian context
that, although prizing civility, tolerance, and respect for hierarchy, takes pleasure in punishing
perceived evildoers. At first glance these two shows appear to have little in common, but close
analysis of their shared attractions reveals a successful media marriage between commerce and
ethics, a union that drives Asian viewers both to fantasize about and to justify their urge to pros-
per (Berry and Zhu 2009; Chua and Iwabuchi 2008).
We can trace this partnership back to the 1980s when popular TV dramas started to embrace
a dialogic reconnection between capitalism and Confucianism, paving the way for the meteoric
rise of My Love from the Star and Hanzawa Naoki. These shows stand out for their search for
an ideal urban Confucian hero who lives up to politicians’ conservative expectations, viewers’
stargazing dreams, and producers’ marketing calculations. This hero, as a formulaic narrative arc
illustrates, flies back in time to bring an old-world order to disorienting capitalist societies, one
that promotes a feudal vision of rigid class distinctions, gendered expectations, and moral truism.
Together these dramas nostalgize a less complicated society in which stability and prosperity
define for a contemporary Asian public the appearance of a good life.
The massive success of the series proves that such narrative compositions work. Accord-
ing to Korea.net, My Love from the Star attracted more than 2.5 billion views online between
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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