ABSTRACT
Accompanying her husband on an official visit to South Korea in July 2014, China’s First Lady Peng Liyuan mentioned to her host that Chinese President Xi Jinping looked a lot like the protagonist Doo Min-joon (Kim Soo-hyun) in the popular Korean drama My Love from the Star, sweeping across Asia in 2013-2014.1 Peng’s comparison between the two leading men, innocuous and complimentary though it seemed, generated intense media interest and testified to the far-reaching “soft power” of TV drama in the game of diplomacy.2 Popular shows have become a form of Asian cultural currency, a lingua franca where the plot and cast circulate in everyday vocabulary.
