The overseas popularity of these romantic sword-wielding heroes is often highlighted in Chinese media coverage of boys’ love period dramas, zooming in on epic overseas streaming numbers and the charm of Chinese culture. “By showing the beauty of Chinese culture, The Untamed has conveyed our cultural confidence and established positive values,” communist mouthpiece People’s Daily wrote at the time, in a surreal piece tying President Xi Jinping’s political buzzword to a boys’ love show.Īnd so, boys’ love period dramas seem to have nestled into official endorsement as a mascot of Chinese soft power.
But the show’s promotion focused on its portrayal of Chinese traditional culture - a push consistent with Chinese Communist Party propaganda. The potential for serious profits encourages companies to continue queerbaiting while trying to please censors by incorporating elements from official state ideology. The 2019 fantasy series The Untamed, featuring an unlikely bond between a cheeky magic-wielder and a stoic ice prince, started an online craze over the pair’s implicit romance. But the demand for boys’ love was clearly insatiable - before it was banned from Youku, Guardian had already racked up over a billion views.
In 2018, the sci-fi drama Guardian went offline on video hosting site Youku two months after its release, even though the original gay romance storyline was rewritten as friendship.
In 2016, the hit teen series Addicted (also known as Heroin), a drama with explicit gay scenes, was pulled from online streaming platform iQIYI before it could release its last three episodes. Making and showing boys’ love dramas in China is a cat-and-mouse game between the profit-driven entertainment industry and the homophobic censorship regime.