Zhan Qingyun Deletes Drama Promo After Backlash Over Feminist Marketing

Zhan Qingyun has deleted the video. For three days it stood as a piece of celebrity endorsement with an unusual charge sheet: the debater — champion of the seventh season of China's hit debate show "U Can U Bibi," Harvard-trained lawyer, and one of the most prominent feminist-adjacent voices in Chinese public life — had recommended the new drama "Early Spring Clear Sky" in a "girls talk" video with her longtime debating partner Pang Ying. By Monday, after a sustained roasting online, Pear Video reported that the video was gone, the casualty of a mismatch between how a drama was marketed and what audiences found inside it.

The marketing had leaned hard on feminism. The show's promotional hashtags celebrated it as "the real big-female-lead drama" and praised its heroine with the line "Shang Zhitao is the heroism of my girlhood"; the press tour leaned on "female friendship" and recruited Zhan and Pang — whose audiences are largely young women who follow them for arguments about female independence — as credible surrogates. It is a playbook that has become standard in Chinese television: "big female lead" is now a sales category, and a endorsement from a recognised feminist voice is the strongest version of it.

The trouble, critics said, is that the source material cannot carry the label. In the original novel, the heroine's relationship with the male lead begins as an affair between a boss and a much younger subordinate — an arrangement that sits awkwardly beside "female growth" branding. Nor was the timing innocent: the row over the drama's heroine founding a startup that does not hire women had barely settled. "The point of contention is not that Zhan Qingyun watched this drama," read one widely shared breakdown. "It's that she recommended it from the angle of 'feminist discussion,' walking straight into the minefield of the values dispute over the original and the adaptation."

That distinction — between privately watching something and publicly lending it your credibility — became the argument's centre of gravity. "Anyone can watch lowbrow stuff," one commenter put it, "but I don't go around recommending that stuff as something worthwhile." Zhan's fans, the reasoning goes, are women who trust her filtering; a recommendation is a product in its own right, and hers carried the drama's marketing out to exactly the audience most likely to audit it.

Not everyone agreed that any of this was fair. "She just watched a drama and shared her opinion — and now even recommending a show isn't allowed?" one defender wrote, in a thread of several thousand likes. But the video stayed deleted, and the calculation it reflects is legible enough: in China's current entertainment market, feminist branding sells dramas to the same educated young women most equipped to check the label against the contents — and least forgiving when the two do not match. The drama, meanwhile, is still trying to court both crowds at once, selling "big female lead" empowerment and sweet-romance fantasy in the same breath.