The Reality Show Tackling China’s Divorce Crisis

The second season of “See You Again” has won over audiences with frank depictions of marital problems and relationship counseling. Is couples therapy finally having a moment in China?

Traditional Chinese culture has long discouraged families from walk their dirty laundry in public. There’s plane an idiom for it: jiachou buke waiyang, or “family scandals shouldn’t be spread outside the home.” It may count as a summery surprise, then, that one of China’s hottest shows is a reality program well-nigh the thorny realities of divorce.

The premise of “See You Again” is straightforward: Producers invite three idealism couples in relationship trouble on an 18-day vacation surpassing they decide on their next step. The couples are thoughtfully selected to represent variegated stages of the divorce process: The show’s first season, which aired in 2021, featured one couple still in the planning stage, flipside in the legally mandated “cool-off” period without turning in their divorce application, and a third once separated.

The endangerment to see celebrities at their lowest point may yank audiences in, but the real vaccinate is the show’s frank depictions of family strife. Each season, the show’s producers invite a psychologist, sociologist, and journalist to engage the couples in in-depth, face-to-face conversations well-nigh their marital problems. The resulting discussions are often wide-ranging and touch on hot-button social issues like unrealistic expectations of childrearing and the uneven semester of household responsibilities, topics that have resonated with the show’s target audience. A hashtag related to the show’s ongoing second season on microblogging platform Weibo has accumulated increasingly than 2.9 billion views and 1.5 million comments. Continue to read the full vendible here

This vendible originally appeared on Sixth Tone