Zhang Linghe, the male lead of 'Pursuit of Jade', attends Gucci Mansion on May 16 in New York City (Photo: Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Gucci/AFP)
I am in Shanghai, China, after 14 years. I have returned not as a tourist, but a visiting artist at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, the storied artists’ residence on the Bund. Pudong’s futuristic skyline glitters across the Huangpu River, and on this side stand the grand colonial façades of the Bund, including the legendary Peace Hotel where the Jazz Bar continues to play every evening.
Shanghai has changed much in a decade and a half, yet Nanjing Road still hums with shoppers carrying luxury bags, livestreamers broadcasting purchases to millions, and blindingly large neon billboards everywhere. As a writer based in Chicago and Kuala Lumpur, I have spent the past year watching governments fixate on tariffs, supply chains and trade treaties.
When I walk through Shanghai, it becomes increasingly clear that another kind of commerce is flourishing beyond what finance ministries can ever negotiate. Forty-episode Chinese television dramas (C-dramas) are quietly accomplishing something governments spend billions trying to achieve.
Across Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, viewers are investing 40 hours inside meticulously built worlds of Chinese history, architecture and kinship. What is being sold is not a product so much as an emotional landscape, and no advertising campaign can buy that level of sustained attention.
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Pursuit of Jade (逐玉) is a historical romance that premiered on Tencent Video, iQIYI and Netflix in March 2026. It became the first Chinese costume drama to enter Netflix’s Global Top 10 Non-English list, was distributed across 191 countries and regions, and topped Google Trends search volume for Chinese dramas in 15 markets including Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
In Shanghai, at the Colorist store inside Shanghai’s Jingan Joy City Mall, rows upon rows of foundation and skincare products stretch across the brightly lit interior. Towering above the displays is the face of Zhang Linghe, the male lead of Pursuit of Jade. His image is impossible to avoid, joined by other Chinese male faces selling foundation and skincare. It is, for me, disorienting to see masculine beauty being marketed to women when cosmetics campaigns have traditionally relied on female models with taglines promising “because you are worth it”.
Singapore’s CNA Lifestyle published an irreverent headline “Zhang Linghe’s face is the real star of Pursuit of Jade — and that’s the point”, making the case that his flawless complexion alone could persuade audiences to buy foundation. Standing inside the store, surrounded by shoppers speaking Mandarin, English, Bahasa Malaysia, Thai and Arabic, I can see why the statement does not seem exaggerated.
Streaming has replaced the old model of parochial, single-market broadcasting: a drama like Pursuit of Jade now plays simultaneously across dozens of countries, subtitled and dubbed, generating advertising, merchandising, tourism, licensing and music royalty revenue on top of subscriptions. China’s television exports have grown accordingly and the National Radio and Television Administration reported a roughly threefold rise in TV series export revenue over the past decade. Chinese platforms have built their own regional distribution networks, with services such as iQIYI International, WeTV and Youku competing for Southeast Asian audiences alongside global streaming giants.
Collectively, groups of women are flexing their growing economic power; the women buying foundation in Shanghai today may be booking flights to filming locations tomorrow or enrolling in Mandarin classes next month. In this environment, dramas like Pursuit of Jade do not merely reflect consumer culture — they plug directly into a vast monetised attention system.
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Beijing itself is ambivalent about the product it is exporting. Junzhengping, a People’s Liberation Army-affiliated commentary account, criticised the Pursuit of Jade male lead, who has been mocked online as the “Foundation General” for looking immaculate mid-battle, warning that “beautifying” soldiers on screen undermines “the spirit of masculinity”. Yet in Thailand, recruitment posters from the Royal Thai Army borrowed imagery associated with Pursuit of Jade, inviting young women to encourage partners to enlist if they wanted a boyfriend with the heroic spirit of the main lead.
Where Chinese state media worried about cosmetic excess, Thai recruiters recognised commercial charisma; soft power built by story-tellers travels and converts in ways state messaging cannot fully control, in either direction. Of course, women do not think about how their government polices masculinity while they are shopping. They are responding to beauty and emotion and the many faces of the “Foundation General” phenomenon are drawing them in.
In a global environment saturated with stories of violence against women, from online misogynistic communities to highly publicised cases of sexual abuse, the extraordinary popularity of C-dramas raises an interesting question: are millions of women seeking fictional worlds built around a softer masculinity that represents something increasingly scarce in their own realities? Whatever the answer, desire has always been a marketplace force and streaming has simply given it a global distribution system.
Southeast Asian countries provide a ready fan base because they already possess the cultural conditions that allow Chinese entertainment to travel easily. Large Chinese-speaking populations, long-standing historical trade links, extensive tourism connections and rapidly expanding streaming audiences mean that Southeast Asian viewers encounter these dramas through layers of existing familiarity. When this is packaged by travel agencies, the line between heritage tourism and fandom tourism disappears.
Fan itineraries built around Pursuit of Jade filming sites include Hengdian World Studios; palace sets, the misty karst formations of Wulong’s Three Natural Bridges in Chongqing and West Lake in Hangzhou. Her World reported on places in China where Pursuit of Jade was possibly filmed, with “beautiful pagodas, grand palaces, traditional shophouses, cobblestone streets and snow-capped mountains”.
This is not a niche phenomenon: The World Travel & Tourism Council estimated that travel and tourism contributed a record US$11 trillion to the global economy in 2024. Cultural exports increasingly determine where a slice of that attention and spending flows, and the pattern is not new (Hollywood, Japanese anime and Korean pop culture all built the same playbook; a drama series transformed New Zealand after The Lord of the Rings, and Croatia after Game of Thrones), but the speed and reach are. “Chinamaxxing,” the term Gen Z Americans popularised for adopting Chinese lifestyle aesthetics, shows the effect reaching audiences with no historical or diasporic tie to China at all.
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In Singapore, healthcare and food culture are becoming part of this ecosystem; in June this year, Tan Tock Seng Hospital’s Instagram account incorporated culinary traditions associated with Chinese wellness culture, including soups inspired by the nourishing dishes portrayed in historical dramas such as Pursuit of Jade.
The rise of drama-inspired fragrances, cosmetics, clothes and lifestyle products demonstrates that successful storytelling does not merely create audiences; it creates markets. On social media, Instagram reels show American women explaining Mandarin language double entendres in Pursuit of Jade and filming themselves in New York at Zhang Linghe’s Gucci appearance; a writing consultant promotes a four-part series of reels on Instagram from America, which are tips on writing effectively, using the drama as reference. In Malaysia, theme stores and bookstores are cashing in on the craze. From India, more Bollywood songs being overlaid on Chinese drama reels on social media.
Standing on the Bund, I am struck by how profoundly the logic of commerce is changing. China once grew rich through ships carrying physical goods across oceans; today, it is exporting narratives. The global entertainment and media industry is projected to reach US$3.5 trillion by 2029, driven increasingly by advertising, streaming, gaming and experiential consumption rather than traditional broadcast revenue. China’s rapidly expanding digital entertainment sector is becoming an increasingly important contributor to this ecosystem.
For Malaysia and Singapore, the lesson is larger than the success of one Chinese drama. The next great export may not leave Port Klang or Singapore in a shipping container. It may arrive through a streaming platform, carrying with it curiosity, aspiration and trust. Stories are the first trade agreement. By the time governments negotiate commerce, storytellers may already have negotiated the desire that makes commerce possible.
Dipika Mukherjee is an award-winning writer and author of 'Shambala Junction' and 'Ode to Broken Things'.
This article first appeared on Aug 3, 2026 in The Edge Malaysia.
