In the scene at the Wuhan bus company, dozens of drivers file into a meeting room shortly before the lockdown is imposed. Instead, the show is a paean to the “touching stories that happened on the front line of the epidemic” and the Chinese people’s “courage to fight and win,” according to the state-run media. That desperation is far from the focus of the show, which was aired by China’s state broadcaster and produced by Shen Haixiong, the deputy minister of the Communist Party’s Publicity Department. Desperate residents shared photos of people being turned away from overwhelmed hospitals, and they raged at the officials who had let the virus spread unchecked in an effort to conceal it. Wuhan was little known outside of China before the pandemic, but as the contagion spread there and then around the world it became a stark warning about the virus’s threat.
The episode was the pilot of a new show, “Heroes in Harm’s Way,” that dramatizes Wuhan’s battle against the outbreak. “In propaganda, they buried the women.” The comment was liked more than 30,000 times. “In real life, they pushed women out” onto the front lines, said one commenter about the show on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. Other female medical workers said their supervisors rebuked them when they asked for help obtaining tampons or pads when goods in Wuhan became increasingly hard to obtain. The newspaper called the women “the most beautiful warriors.” Many people who saw the video said the women were crying, and viewers accused the government of using women’s bodies as propaganda. In February, an official newspaper shared a video of female medics having their heads shaved before heading to Wuhan, ostensibly for a better fit for protective gear. This is not the first time that women’s treatment while fighting the virus has set off public anger. “I didn’t think there would be such a plotline now.” But I thought that something would change this year, after the experience of the epidemic, because so many women participated in the fight,” Zoe Shen, a feminist activist and blogger in Beijing, said in an interview. “In previous television dramas, women would frequently be smeared.
Still-simmering tensions include cynicism about the Chinese government’s efforts to rewrite the narrative of the outbreak, disillusionment about the silencing of dissenting accounts and anger toward persistent discrimination against women, both during the crisis and more broadly. The uproar reflects lingering tensions even as China emerges from an outbreak that sickened many, cratered its economy and upended the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Tens of thousands of people had called for the show to be taken off the air. In reality, women made up the majority of front-line workers during the crisis, according to the official news media.īy Sunday, a hashtag about that segment, which aired on Thursday, had been viewed more than 140 million times. Users have called the scene - in which the official then asks why no women have stepped up - a flagrant example of sexism in Chinese society and an attempt to erase women’s contributions to the fight against the virus. That roughly minute-long clip has set off a furor on Chinese social media. “Strikes just the right balance between realism and fantasy, which is hard.The scene came seven minutes into a new Chinese-government-sponsored television drama, so short that it would have been easy to miss: The head of a bus company in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus outbreak began, asks his drivers if they are willing to make emergency runs during the city’s lockdown. Can she save Yun-Ru? Will love endure? “A simple story that engages viewers’ minds,” says Rui Ma. And it turns out Quan-Sheng isn’t her boyfriend but is instead Zi-Wei, Yun-Ru’s classmate. One day, she wakes up in the hospital with Quan-Sheng but is trapped in 17-year-old Yun-Ru’s body. Twenty-seven-year-old Huang Yu-Hsuan still misses her boyfriend Wang Quan-Sheng, who disappeared two years ago.
This Taiwanese series blends time travel, romance, and mystery and manages to be smart, whimsical, and poignant. Justice, loyalty, sacrifice, and most of all a slow burn, this love story has women and men squealing. He and his soulmate cultivator, Lan Wang Ji, solve different mysteries, including who’s responsible for Wu Xian’s original demise. Fans are so enthusiastic about recommending the show that it’s been called “The Untamed Pyramid Scheme.” Wei Wu Xian is resurrected 16 years after his death. “Romantic with a capital R that’s rare to find in other media,” says Natasha Simonova, a fan of the series and teaching fellow at Oxford. Based on Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s novel, the series features well-rounded characters and a nonlinear plot with lots of subtext. The Untamed is a Xianxia (immortal hero Chinese fantasy) romance-mystery that’s a global phenomenon.