Older Sister/Younger Brother Romance

There’s something a little odd about using family terms to refer to romantic relationships, but with the current popularity of Tencent’s hit show Nothing But You, about a young tennis player developing feelings for his older female manager, everyone seems to be talking about 姐弟恋, jiedi lian (Older Sister/Younger Brother Romance). Even the regular handful of Anglophone China watchers are now talking about the phenomenon of older women dating younger men, and the ‘normalisation’ of it in Chinese media. Whilst the sub-genre has proliferated over the last few years (some of the most popular include Mango TV’s A Rational life and IQiyi’s Dr Appledog’s Time, both released in 2021), shows about career-oriented women dating younger men have in fact, been a thing in contemporary Chinese storytelling since at least the middle of the last decade.  


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