Somewhere along the way, foreigners fell in love with our local specialty: Jinjiang’s overbearing CEO novels.
You might picture the New York Public Library as all noble and aloof 👇
But in reality, the New York Public Library has a whole shelf of Jinjiang CEO novels 👇
Yes, you read that right. The World Language shelf is packed with titles like:
Mind-Reading Maid, The Lady’s Aesthetic of Violence, Actuarial Assessment of Your Heart, The Young Master’s Little Trouble...
Open any one of them at random, and it’s enough to make you cringe so hard you could dig out a three-bedroom apartment.
So the Chinese that Americans are learning turns out to be from Jinjiang overbearing CEO novels. I’m really afraid that someday they’ll start speaking like: “She flees, he chases, and she can’t escape even if she grows wings.”
So Cheesy It’s Addictive: Jinjiang’s Overbearing CEOs Lead the Cultural Export
Just look at this overbearing CEO copy that a netizen found on Google: The President’s Wife Returns Home with Her Child❗
"President, your ex-wife whom was divorced by you 3 years ago showed up at the airport, holding a 4-year-old."
"Lock down the airport now."
“President, your ex-wife of three years is at the airport with a four-year-old child.”
“Seal off the airport!”
This text is all too familiar—right up there with that princess who was hung on the city wall for three days. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to hit the report button on reflex 😅
And that princess has also made her way abroad:
"Sir, Madame has been hanging on the wall for three days!"
Countless netizens have lost sleep over it, their hearts breaking and in tears.
That overbearing CEO called Bo Ye entangled with his wife Tang Shi for five years in Debt of Deep Love, Entwined Together, and foreigners have followed the English translation His Vengeful Ex-Wife through all 2,136 chapters.
2,136 chapters, 3.2 million characters—with that kind of stamina you could have finished all four great classical novels.
Readers curse as they binge: "Bo Ye, you piece of trash! You don’t know the first thing about love!"
And then frantically plead for more: "I’ve finished all the available chapters. Are there any more?"
A CEO novel that gets a few hundred thousand clicks on Jinjiang easily racks up hundreds of millions of views overseas.
A tacky web novel with an embarrassing title like Trial Marriage Husband: Give It Your Best becomes Trial Marriage Husband: Need to Work Hard in English, and it’s an undisputed top-tier web novel, consistently in the Top 10 romance novels on Qidian’s international site Webnovel.
The plot remains the same:
The night before their wedding, her fiancé ran off with his mistress.
The night before the wedding, her fiancé ran off with his mistress.
Five years on, countless foreign netizens are still going crazy over it:
“OMG, as a girl, I love this novel so much! Please keep updating, author!”
“It’s not just you gals who love it; even as a big guy I can’t stop reading.”
“I second that.”
It still dominates the charts today, at a level where foreigners re-read it four times and still burst into storms of tears. Seriously, don’t love it too much.
The Possessive CEO series is undoubtedly a foreign favorite, with titles like Loved in Secret by a Dangerous CEO, The Cold CEO’s Secret Wife, I’m the Boss’s Secretary?! 👇
BravoNovel’s Top 10 is almost entirely overbearing CEO novels.
Whether it’s a “chase the wife to the crematorium” marriage-first-love-later story or a sweet pet romance where the overbearing CEO falls for the innocent girl, foreigners are utterly obsessed and can’t get enough.
If an update is even a little slow, everyone starts frantically demanding more 👇
Some foreigners can’t wait and just start writing themselves.
That’s how Disha Florence from Bangladesh wrote eight web novels in a row and shot to fame on Webnovel.
Even though she’s a foreigner, she’s well-versed in the essence of Jinjiang literature; her Handsome CEO’s Darling Wife racked up tens of millions of views.
There are even many international students abroad who study North American Jinjiang novels to improve their English 👇
The Light of Mary Sue Illuminates the World
Beyond web novels, cheap overbearing CEO TV dramas are also the darlings of foreign netizens.
Zhang Han’s If You Are Well, It’s a Sunny Day scores a 4.5 on Douban. Netizens: a few more glances and you’ll feel like you’ve been struck by lightning on a sunny day.
Yet this drama, once overseas, pulls in millions of views per episode on YouTube. Foreigners are losing their minds:
“I love this drama so much! Everyone should watch it!”
“Everyone loves the male lead, but I proclaim my love for the female lead.”
“Love it, love it! The couple I ship is so sweet!”
Gentlemen of the East 8th District scores 2.1 on Douban. Netizens: every character gleams with greasy radiance, like a platter of roast chicken that satisfies the craving at first glance. Thanks, Zhang Han.
Foreign netizens still love it, even re-watching every episode and writing romantic paeans to their beautiful friendship and love:
Who would have thought that the "pond master" would one day become the standard-bearer of cultural export? The three-bedroom apartment you cringed out of turns out to be a happy homeland for foreigners.
Click on either of the above dramas, and you’ll also be rewarded with a YouTube “Recommended for You” Mary Sue drama playlist 👇
Never Forgetting Love – Single mom × amnesiac CEO
Years of Allure – Arrogant diamond bachelor × lively rookie designer
The Heiress’s Contract Marriage – Billionaire CEO falls for bankrupt Cinderella
Forbidden to Love – Heiress reduced to a nanny, the cold CEO secretly lends a hand
……
Just saying, if you don’t browse YouTube, you might not realize how prolific Chinese dramas are 😅
Foreigners are completely enamored: “A great work, great actors!”
It’s not just web series; Mary Sue mobile games also have foreigners hooked.
Mihoyo’s top-tier otome game Tears of Themis boasts several hundred thousand followers on Twitter and over a million downloads on Google Play, rivaling the popularity of its sibling Genshin Impact.
But among the four husbandos, the most popular is still the overbearing CEO Artem, who leads by a wide margin in Reddit polls 👇
Who doesn’t love a B-king who means what he says? The last one this popular was Li Zeyan.
Overbearing CEOs Unite the Hearts of People Around the World
It’s not as if foreigners have just recently fallen for overbearing CEO and Mary Sue stories.
Fifty Shades of Grey took the world by storm back in the day, and when we checked it out, good heavens—even Jinjiang novels from ten years ago weren’t written this way anymore.
The overbearing CEO has childhood trauma, appears wild and untamed but is actually fragile and soft-hearted inside. He takes the female lead on flights, on yachts, wakes her up in a five-meter bed every day, and casually buys the company where she works.
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The female lead is utterly ordinary, and right from the start she trips and falls in front of the overbearing CEO. His internal monologue: Woman, you have successfully piqued my interest. And then the crazy, torturous love begins.
After three movies, the author cleaned up, vaulting straight into the billionaire club.
Never underestimate people’s love for soapy drama.
That Netflix’s Emily in Paris has made it to a third season is on all of us. Every time we finish watching, we curse it for being a train wreck, and then the next season we gleefully click play again.
Maybe it’s just guilty pleasure.
As a guilt-free, brainless soap, the female lead ping-pongs between the chef and Alfie—he loves her, she loves him, she loves both.
Some call it a substitute for Gossip Girl, which is enough to make GG fans want to throw punches. Back then, Chuck’s “I’m Chuck Bass” ushered in the era of Anglo-American overbearing CEOs.
It feels like Emily in Paris should be compared to Tiny Times—it falls into the “I’m basic and I love it” series.
Netflix knows how to grasp its audience. While Anglo-American romance dramas lag twenty years behind, South Korea has it figured out—just buy the rights. Last year, Business Proposal climbed straight to No.4 on Netflix’s global daily TV chart. Maybe this is the overbearing CEO that the whole world can’t escape.
Netflix’s global buying spree has been wildly profitable, and it doesn’t just buy Korean dramas—it buys Chinese ones too. There are longtime viral hits like Ashes of Love and Who Rules the World, plus last year’s blockbuster Love Between Fairy and Devil 👇
These high-traffic dramas have massive fan bases. Who doesn’t love a sweet yet angsty romance between an all-powerful demon realm CEO and a little fairy orchid from the immortal realm?
From Web Novels and Dramas to Cultural Export
From cheesy overbearing CEO stories to xianxia dramas brimming with mysterious power, to Chinese comics and games that only grow in popularity, there’s always something to satisfy foreign netizens who’ve grown tired of Marvel.
To help foreigners fully understand Chinese web novels, Wuxiaworld, a site famous for translating Chinese wuxia and xianxia novels, even created a dedicated guide section introducing Chinese learning tips and the fundamentals of Daoist philosophy, in a very accessible way. For instance:
What is the Dao? 0 => 1 => 2 => 4 => 8 => 64
(One gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, three gives birth to the ten thousand things.)
Some foreigners even become class representatives themselves, opening Chinese culture lecture halls on YouTube, not only recommending great Chinese novels to international netizens but also explaining the background knowledge of various wuxia and xuanhuan stories.
Now that’s stepping up—solid cultural export. Even if some web novels and dramas remain cringeworthy, they have ignited a passion among foreigners for learning Chinese and understanding Chinese culture.
Breaking down prejudices and fostering cross-cultural exchange between China and the world may just start with these “local specialties.”
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