SEOUL, Sept 22 — South Korean superstar Jun Ji-hyun’s long-awaited return to television is making waves — but not the kind Disney+ was hoping for.
The 43-year-old actress, best known for My Love From the Star and Kingdom, is facing a fierce backlash in China over her new political thriller Tempest, which premiered globally this month.
The controversy erupted after episode four featured Jun’s character, a former United Nations diplomat running for South Korea’s presidency, questioning China’s stance on war.
“Why would China prefer war? That way, nuclear bombs would fall along the border areas,” she says in a tense scene.
The single line has been branded “fabricated” and “politically defamatory” by outraged Chinese viewers, who flooded social media with calls to boycott the series and the actress herself.
“If China favours war, South Korea will no longer be a country,” one commenter fumed on Weibo, while another lamented that “the good relationships she accumulated in China over the past 20 years are gone.”
Fuelling the fire, viewers also took issue with the show’s depiction of the Chinese port city of Dalian as a shady, dilapidated setting.
Some even pointed out that the supposed Dalian backdrop was actually filmed at a Hong Kong factory, accusing the production of deliberate misrepresentation.
Fans of Jun, however, have pushed back, urging Chinese netizens to remain rational and to separate the actress from the fictional storyline. Disney+ has yet to respond to the uproar.
Despite the political storm, Tempest is performing strongly for the streamer, which recently announced it as the platform’s most-watched Korean original premiere of 2025 in its first five days of release.
The series follows Jun as Seo Mun-ju, a former diplomat unravelling a conspiracy that stretches from Seoul to Washington after an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate accused of being a North Korean spy.
With high-stakes action and an international backdrop, Tempest was meant to mark Jun’s triumphant TV comeback after a four-year hiatus. Instead, it’s testing the limits of cross-border diplomacy — on and off screen.
