General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Women in Beijing (北京女子图鉴)

Women in Beijing (北京女子图鉴) is a 2018 Chinese web drama produced by Youku, an authorized adaptation of the Japanese series Tokyo Women's Journal (東京女子図鑑), following a young woman from Sichuan who spends ten years building a career in Beijing.¹^•² It premiered on April 10, 2018, ran for 20 episodes, and starred Qi Wei as the heroine Chen Ke.¹ A companion series, Women of Shanghai, followed the same licensing arrangement.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	北京女子图鉴 (Běijīng nǚzǐ tújiàn); English title Women in Beijing¹
Broadcast	Youku, premiered April 10, 2018; 20 episodes¹
Source	Authorized adaptation of Tokyo Women's Journal, licensed by Watanabe Entertainment and Tokyo Calendar Co.²
Lead cast	Qi Wei as Chen Ke; director Li Zhi; screenwriter Zhang Jia¹
Story span	Chen Ke's decade in Beijing, 2008 to 2018, from small-company receptionist to entrepreneurship⁴
Audience reach	About 1.28 billion views on Youku; Weibo topic reads of 1.17 billion with 1.627 million discussions⁵
Douban rating	6.7 shortly after premiere; 6.2 with about 13,000 reviews later in the run, against 8.6 for the Tokyo version⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Premise and production

The drama opens in 2008 with Chen Ke, a college graduate from a small city in Sichuan, giving up a stable civil-service path at home and moving to Beijing. She starts as a receptionist at a small company, moves to a planning team at a foreign firm, and later becomes a business representative, cycling through choices and setbacks across ten years.³ Producer Lu Lin described the character's job changes, from foreign-enterprise sales to the internet industry, entertainment marketing, and finally private entrepreneurship, as mirroring how fast the era itself was changing.³

Production moved quickly by drama standards: the screenplay took six months, filming began in Beijing in October 2017, and shooting wrapped on December 31, 2017 in Leshan, Sichuan, with the series online the following April.⁸ The production company was Hero Kiddo Media (雄孩子传媒), whose team had earlier made the animated-drama adaptation Rakshasa Street; Lu Lin served as producer and Ma Xiaonan, general manager of Youku's drama center, as supervisor.⁵^•⁹

The creators positioned the series as a "mirror drama" (镜像剧), gathering material from street interviews with migrants to Beijing so that viewers would recognize their own experiences in the character. Screenwriter Zhang Jia said the intent was to tell the story of "the Chen Kes", not one woman, and that the writing avoided the "Mary Sue" and naive-heroine formulas in favor of realism.¹⁰^•¹¹ Zhang Jia also said she dropped the character 依 from the heroine's original name, Chen Keyi, as a marker of abandoning her earlier "girl dream" screenwriting mode.¹²

Adaptation from the Tokyo version

The rights came from Watanabe Entertainment and Tokyo Calendar Co., the holders of Tokyo Women's Journal, under a 2017 agreement with Youku to develop two Chinese versions set in Beijing and Shanghai.² Supervisor Ma Xiaonan said the license was used differently from other Japanese remakes: only the structural device of the "journal" format was borrowed, with the content rewritten for each city.¹³ An academic textual analysis by Du Yao found that the two series keep the same overall plot direction and character relationships, but that the Beijing version expands the material substantially: the Tokyo original runs 11 episodes of about 20 minutes each, roughly 220 minutes in total, while the Beijing version runs 20 episodes of about 30 minutes, roughly 600 minutes, adding and altering many characters and inserting Chinese elements such as office romance, buying an apartment, and Beijing household registration.¹⁴

Commentators also noted deliberate differences in tone. Reviews in Jiemian praised the adaptation for staying grounded, showing boyfriends who leave over practical choices and superiors who help Chen Ke because they want something from her, rather than turning the story into a romance fantasy.⁶ Others argued the remake lost what made the original distinctive: the Tokyo version's heroine, Saito Aya, openly pursues ambition and uses marriage to move up in class over roughly two decades, while Chen Ke's choices are written as more consistently positive, and the remake's workplace plot was judged by some critics as not "professional" enough, missing the original's strongest theme of how a woman builds a career from zero.¹⁵^•⁷

Reception and controversy

The series ran from April 10 to May 8, 2018 and became a talking point: about 1.28 billion views on Youku, more than 50,000 comments, 1.17 billion Weibo topic reads, and 1.627 million discussions, with episodes touching on renting, job hunting, workplace sexual harassment, and women's career ambitions repeatedly reaching Weibo's trending list.⁵ Its closing scene has Chen Ke sell her apartment and start a new venture, writing that Beijing is "a city of unlimited possibilities".⁵

The values debate. Critical reception split. Early viewers praised details such as sharing a damp basement room, lowering a salary demand in interviews, and opening a credit card to buy a coveted handbag, which drove the score above 7 at the start.¹⁶ As the run continued, the Douban rating settled at 6.2 with about 13,000 reviews, far below the Tokyo version's 8.6 with nearly 70,000 reviews.⁷ The main criticism was that Chen Ke's advances at work appear to depend on men: a former classmate gets her the receptionist job, a boss moves her to a foreign firm, and a bandage given to a future boss leads to another jump, leading some viewers to call the show "the story of one woman and eleven men"; the poster did show Chen Ke surrounded by eleven male characters, which screenwriter Zhang Jia said were mostly cameo roles as friends and colleagues rather than love interests.¹⁷ A People's Daily commentary argued that the heroine's independence erodes as the plot advances, quoting a Douban reviewer who called the show's women driven by profit rather than principle, with none succeeding on merit alone.¹⁸ Producer Lu Lin responded that, given conditions in China, a heroine who expresses desire as bluntly as Saito Aya would not feel realistic, and that Chen Ke's steadier path is closer to how ordinary Chinese women advance.¹⁵

The novel and the seasonal films

The title also belongs to an unrelated work. The writer Wang Xin, who publishes under the pen name "Fankuchendi" (反裤衩阵地), had serialized a novel titled Women in Beijing since November 2017 and publicly stated that the Youku drama had nothing to do with him; copyright law protects content, not titles.² His novel, based on interviews with more than 300 women who migrated to Beijing, was published in 2019.¹⁹^•²⁰ Youku and Motie Media then adapted the novel into Youku's first seasonal series of web films: four independent features, Assistant Queen, Breakup Livestream, Farewell Love, and The Plastic Surgery Master, released from December 19, 2019 onward, starring Wang Ju, Deng Jiajia, Pei Bei, and Dong Xuan in separate stories.²^•²⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026