Yet just a year later, Chinese TV hit on the secret sauce: take out the women, set it in a fantasy world, and ramp up the sexual tension between the boys.īoys’ love, or BL, is the new black, and Chinese audiences and readers can’t get enough of it. A drama about class divisions set in present-day China – where class divisions aren’t up for discussion – was never going to work. Following the tensions between a poor girl and four rich boys, the mainland version was unwatchable. A 2018 Chinese remake of the Taiwanese show Meteor Garden is a good example.

For years, Chinese television dramas were the poor cousins of Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese soap operas.