The C-Drama Finale That Crossed the Taiwan Strait: 'Early Spring Sunshine' Ends on Top
The romance drama 'Early Spring Sunshine' (早春晴朗) ended its run this week with a proposal, a record-breaking streak on Youku — and a response from China's Taiwan Affairs Office, after the show became a rare mainland hit in Taiwan. Its 'old-fashioned' formula is doing the explaining.
The finale of Early Spring Sunshine (早春晴朗), the mainland romance drama that has spent eleven consecutive days above Youku's 10,000-point heat index — the platform's best of 2026 — ended this week with the reunion its audience spent six years of screen-time waiting for: Luan Nian, the cold executive played by Jing Boran, proposing to Shang Zhitao, the colleague he had loved and lost, in front of her family. Clips of the scene flooded Weibo under two trending topics, and co-star Sun Qian told interviewers the wrap-day scene left her with genuine post-show "withdrawal."
An old-fashioned hit
The show's success is a return to form by design. Commentary on Baidu's hot board credits its revival of "old-flavour" idol-drama conventions — the imperious but devoted boss, the long chase, the grand reunion — that mainland prestige dramas had spent years ironicizing. Where recent hits traded in workplace realism or crime, Early Spring Sunshine offers what analysts call pure emotional value: a love story whose plausibility is not the point. Even the marketing leaned into sincerity; actor Jing Boran reportedly prepared more than 200 outfits for the role, with twenty-odd brands lending their support.
That sincerity has traveled. The drama became a hit in Taiwan — a mainland romance crossing over in both directions is rare — and the question followed it to a State Council Taiwan Affairs Office press conference in Beijing on September 9, where spokesperson Chen Binhua said the mainland welcomes more works of "cross-strait cooperation" depicting "family affection and good living" to reach audiences on both sides, a "two-way journey" of feeling.
It is not pure diplomacy: on the mainland, the show's revival of a genre once dismissed as dated has been argued over in reviews, with critics calling it escapist and fans calling that the point. But a mainland drama trending in Taiwan, then being endorsed from a Beijing podium within the same week, is a small cultural marker worth noting: the formula of an ordinary love story, done conventionally and well, crossed a boundary that official messaging alone cannot.