Why Chinese Romance Novels Have No 'Guangdong CEOs'
A viral joke about the romance-novel 'domineering CEO' — always from Beijing, never from Guangdong — has turned into a nationwide roast of how different regions perform wealth, and the punchline says more about China than the trope does.
The question doing the rounds on Chinese social media sounds frivolous until you answer it: why do romance novels only ever have Beijing-circle CEOs? Where, the meme asks, is the Guangdong domineering CEO?
The "domineering CEO" — bazong in Chinese — is the stock hero of the country's romance-reading industry: cold-eyed, immaculately suited, heir to a fortune he deploys mostly on the heroine's behalf. In web novels he is almost always of the "Beijing circle," the old-capital elite whose wealth reads as hereditary and political. The meme that has users appending one joke after another to the same thread is about what happens when you transpose that figure south.
The answers are a masterclass in regional stereotype, delivered with affection. A Beijing-circle crown prince, one widely shared image declares, presents his beloved with "my antiques, my famous paintings — they will all be yours." His Guangdong counterpart offers: "This is my collection of fish maw and dried tangerine peel. I'll use them for slow-cooked soup this evening." Where the northern hero dines on steak by candlelight, a second panel notes, the Guangdong lead eats beef offal — from a street stall, presumably, in flip-flops.
Another meme compares wardrobes: the Beijing prince in bespoke everything; the Guangdong magnate in "middle-school track pants, worn for over a decade, looser and more comfortable every year — simply the best loungewear." A commenter under the original post supplied the detail that seals it: picture a Guangdong rich second generation and what appears is "a tank top, shorts, flip-flops, and several trays of keys jangling."
The joke works because it is half-true, and both halves say something. Guangdong — the province that has led China's export economy for four decades — has a long cultural memory of quiet money: the tea-house regular in expensive sneakers who owns the block. Northern web-fiction conventions, by contrast, built their fantasy aristocracy around the capital, where status is the currency. When readers say they "cannot imagine" a Guangdong CEO, they mean the region's wealth myth is domestic, culinary and unbothered by display — a man who would rather you admire his mother's soup stock than his watch.
There is a sharper edge under the humor, too. Romance-novel wealth is almost always inherited, displayed and spent on the heroine; the Guangdong version in the jokes is stewed, kept, and fed to guests. Readers are effectively ranking two ideas of what money is for, and the soup keeps winning.
The original post drew nearly 3,000 likes and a comment section still appending scenarios — a reminder that the country's most beloved genre shorthand is now being edited by the people it describes.
The thread is still taking submissions. The Guangdong CEO, meanwhile, remains to be written.