Actress Jeon Ji-hyun has faced complaints from Chinese netizens regarding a line related to China that she delivered in a drama.
According to Hong Kong's Sing Tao Daily on the 21st (local time), a scene from the Disney Plus original series ‘Polaris’, in which Jeon Ji-hyun, the lead actress, says, “Why does China prefer war? A nuclear bomb could fall in the border area,” has been edited and circulated among Chinese online communities.
In ‘Polaris’, Jeon Ji-hyun plays the role of Seo Mun-joo, a presidential candidate with a background as a UN ambassador.
The media reported that Chinese netizens criticized Jeon Ji-hyun's line as tarnishing China's image and being inconsistent with reality.
It was also explained that a scene set in Dalian, Northeast China, was filmed in Hong Kong, and some believe that the production team intentionally shot a dirty shantytown area in dark tones to damage Dalian's urban image.
Additionally, some netizens raised issues with a scene where a carpet symbolizing China’s five-star pattern is stepped on, and a scene where the antagonist speaks in Chinese, reinforcing a negative image.
Furthermore, there were reports of Chinese netizens claiming that Jeon Ji-hyun intentionally distorted the pronunciation while reciting a line from the ancient Chinese poet Li Bai (701–762).
As a result, there have been calls on China's largest social media platform Weibo (the Chinese version of X) to maintain the ban on Korean content (Hanhanryeong), and it has been reported that brands associated with Jeon Ji-hyun, such as cosmetics and watches, have pulled their advertisements.
In China, global OTT services like Disney Plus and Netflix are not officially available.
However, they can be easily accessed through indirect channels, leading to immediate reactions from Chinese viewers to Korean works such as the ‘Squid Game’ series, ‘Moving’, and ‘Bokssak Sogassuda’. Recently, a cooking competition show in China that seems to have copied Netflix's ‘Nailed It!’ has sparked controversy.
[Ji Seung-hoon, Star Today Reporter]
