Shine On Me
Starring Song Weilong, Zhao Jinmai
36 episodes
Viu, iQIYI, Netflix
This is easily one of the most successful love stories of 2025, if you go by, not only ratings or charts, but also by how Song Weilong and Zhao Jinmai went viral second every second, with Song Weilong becoming once more a high-traffic brand ambassador. He drew mobs on his recent visit to Bangkok as Gucci brand ambassador after the smash run of Shine On Me on Netflix and Viu.
In this screenshot from Netflix, the sweet moment between Song Weilong and Zhao Jinmai has a third wheel—the Miu Miu bag which he, like a gentleman, carries for her.
A love story most successful—and romantic. Thanks to good episode writing, Gu Man’s novel Blazing Sunlight becomes a well-sustained narrative that leads you to binge on episode after episode. 36 episodes. Fortunately, C-drama has yet to be fully Netflix-ied, meaning turned into a market-driven template (but let’s not go into that).
First things first. This series has the eye candy to keep you glued: Song Weilong’s (Go Ahead, Find Yourself, Youthful Glory, all on Netflix) killer stare must be the most lethal in today’s C-drama, a face made for closeups; Zhao Jinmai (Amidst a Snowstorm of Love, Our Generation, The Princess Royal) has that face of innocence and naivete that turns into adult sex appeal. Their visual match is perfect—he the tall model-figure with clothes-hanger shoulders and very long torso (early on in his career, he became known for those long legs), she the petite, little-girl build, girlish. The drama is replete with kilig, drop-dead entrances of the OTP or singly, he dapper in trench coats and she so feminine in high-glam dresses. How can you lose?
But this story is anything but skin-deep or idol-style. The story keeps you engrossed in seeing and feeling what it’s like to survive a broken family, to fight the greed for power and fortune within one’s own family, to move on from a tragic past, and to make hard choices for the future. You relate to the conflicts even as you swoon over the visuals.
Good storytelling (and dialogue) mines the OTP’s idol looks—a winner formula
Good storytelling (and dialogue) mines the OTP’s idol looks—a winner formula. And, the OTP turns in such highly nuanced acting and natural chemistry; those faces alone can deliver a whole gamut of emotions, so naturally—youthful yet honest performance.
The drama opens in the operating room, with the young surgeon at work. The procedure done, the hotshot surgeon gets a call from his friend setting him up for a date. The nerdy doctor says no until he’s told the name—the daughter of big business who happened to catch his eye at the party the previous night. She’s inviting him over to her city, the nearby Wuxi, so his friend claims, to see the plum blossoms. He says yes readily, drives excitedly to Wuxi, and meets a tragic accident that will change the course of his promising life.
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This C-drama is about a mistaken identity that has become the seed of love and longing through the years—in him, not in her. Until halfway into their toxic office relationship, she didn’t know that he’s kept an eye on her all along—out of spite because he believes that she was responsible for his tragic accident. He’s wanted answers, if not revenge.
Song Weilong is Lin Yusen, the scion of big business who becomes a hotshot neurosurgeon preferring not to work in the family business, that is until he meets that serious accident that leaves his surgeon’s hand badly injured. There is no going back to surgical practice, his passion.
Zhao Jinmai is Nie Xiguang, another scion who’s graduating from college. The series begins with her last year in college, a young woman going through the juvenile pain of unrequited first love (Zhuang Xu as Lai Wei Ming). She has to choose where to work—in a big firm in Shanghai where her first love snags a cushy job, or in a big company in a smaller city (Suzhou) where her family holds interest. The major stakeholder of that big new-energy business happens to be the family of Song Weilong’s Lin Yusen character.
In short, his and her families are in the solar energy or renewable energy industry that is then a struggling start-up but is clearly the industry of the future for China. “Shine” in the title (the sun, “the light of his life, the love of his life,” its popular OST goes)—get it?
C-drama is almost always pegged on an industry/business or profession (e.g. e-sports, electric vehicle, game design, publishing) that must be meant to inspire the aspirations of a humongous population/manpower. Given this thrust, C-drama yields the best workplace plots. In this series, this couple struggles to build their own clean energy business designed to go global. (How current)
The backstory of Yusen’s longing and obsession: Yusen spots Xiguang in a high-power party for scions. Why and how she catches his eye makes for a good telling in the middle of the series. The morning after the party, Yusen, getting that fateful call from a friend, becomes just too eager to make that fateful drive to the blind date.
After the tragic accident, he has to give up medical practice and settle for working for the new-energy conglomerate of his maternal grandfather. An only child, he was raised by this grandfather after his mother, the patriarch’s daughter, decided to live abroad, away from the wealth and corporate infighting in the family. Yusen’s father has helped build the conglomerate only to be eased out by his wife’s brother and to die in a foreign land—thus the bitterness of the mother leading to her self-exile. Even if Yusen has grown up under the wing of his grandfather, in the ancestral estate, Yusen keeps a polite but cold distance from the old man.
He’s about two years into turning around the grandfather’s business, when he decides to move to a satellite of his grandfather’s business, in the smaller Suzhou—apparently after he learns that Xiguang will join it.
The new hire Xiguang has no idea who Yusen actually is, only that he’s the managing director, her boss—the first time they come face to face is a funny scene (no spoilers here). Xiguang is still hung up on that first love from college— Lai Wei Ming, now a rookie banker in Shanghai.
In their office life, Yusen the managing director seeks for clues or signs from her if she remembers that aborted blind date. She doesn’t. But how could she not—his bitterness pesters, so he gives her a hard time at work. No matter the hints he drops alluding to their aborted date, she remains clueless. The office becomes a romcom setting, surely entertaining for viewers out to binge-watch. She even asks him if he’s a TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) doctor, obviously with no idea that he was once a surgeon—this riles him even more. She’s oblivious to this tension because she’s still hung up on her first love.
Office matters inevitably bring them together, until an incident turns things around, and at last she asks him why he’s been bullying her. Because you “forget,” he says, a reply lost on her. This incident and their work lead to a thawing of their frosty relationship, and she finally learns who he is in the company, the grandson of the tycoon owner.
When he realizes that she really has not a clue about his grudge from the tragic past, he swears to her that he’ll stop maltreating her. Their prickly office relationship turns into a gradual build-up of friendship and romance. His pursuit of her turns into a kilig marathon for netizens. The stand-offs turn into flirting. Watch him on the brink of confessing his feelings for her in that hotel corridor, even as he sees her crumble in pain over her failed first love.
The mix of drama and comedy yields many rewind moments. The ski resort scene where both their parents accidentally meet will crack you up. The 80th birthday banquet of Yusen’s grandfather, where Xiguang makes a grand entrance is another rewindable scene. The series also has medical drama and ample background story on the PV industry (the photovoltaic technology that converts sunlight into electric power).
The confession to her by her first love played by Zhuang Xu—the other guy—is touching, even if he’s too late in trying to win her back. Zhuang Yu’s other-guy character is well fleshed out—a struggling poor student who aces his academics to land a good job in a Shanghai bank. (This young idol is given ample screen time, his portrayal so dramatic and mature, which comes as a shock if you see his hip vlog posts rapping.) In fact, even second leads in this series, like the parents of the OTP, enjoy good character development: you understand why they do what they do.
But this remains the story of Yusen and Xiguang who turn from adversaries to partners to battle business and life together ultimately, and how their parents’ lives shape them, yet don’t define them. The family dynamic is crucial to the plot. A riveting part is the revelation of who really is the culprit behind that mistaken identity.
A main reason we love Shine on Me, and obviously why it trended among netizens and is still trending, is—it doesn’t dumb you down. This love story is no straight predictable line. It takes great pains in character development: the female lead starts off native and perky, but grows into an assertive career woman with her own identity and ambition. Indeed K-drama and C-drama are about character development, not gimmicky plots or punchline-dialogues.
The female lead is not ditzy.
The female lead is not ditzy…. it presents women as empowered, sharp business minds, equal to men
Another reason to love about Shine on Me is how it presents women as empowered, sharp business minds, equal to men. In truth this is one thing that sets C-drama apart: women, even in its historical/period dramas, grow into emancipated characters.
In Shine on Me, the female lead’s mother, after surviving the divorce and continuing a testy relationship with a chauvinist husband, decides that she will not be just a “wife material,” that there’s a greater purpose to her life.
The confrontation with the father on his sickbed becomes cathartic for both the female lead and her mother.
This series gives a good glimpse of how the Chinese do business—and promote their own technology, or even their biggest ski resort in Asia (it’s amusing how they dish the rival Hokkaido). Nothing that good writing can’t do.
And the kissing scenes—netizens actually watch out for these (and rate them!). Well, in one passionate kissing scene of Yusen and Xiguang, there is a third party on our screen: Xiguang’s Miu Miu bag!
In another kilig scene, I love how our male lead Song Weilong, all decked in Gucci, carries his beloved girlfriend’s bag throughout—another Miu Miu. These days, it’s cool for confident guys to carry their girlfriend’s bag. That’s women emancipation, circa 2020s.
