Chinese dramas have taken off this year. After breaking into the upper ranks of Netflix's global chart, they now appear in the top 10 on Korea's major streaming services as well. Recently, as "Chinese sensibility" has caught on among younger viewers, Chinese content has ridden the wave to popularity. The drama "The Best Thing" is one of them — a production that sparked heated buzz across mainland China early this year. On the surface, it is an office romance in which the heiress of a solar-power company joins the firm as a junior employee and becomes entangled with a male lead who was formerly a doctor.
What drew attention was not the sweet love story but the tech ambition hidden behind it. In the drama, the company is pushed to the brink by steep U.S. anti-dumping tariffs and a cutoff of parts. Its factories go idle, overseas contracts are torn up, and the firm itself faces takeover. The backbone of the story is a narrative in which the entire workforce bands together, undaunted by the crisis, to develop next-generation solar technology. Armed with "core technology that cannot be replaced," the company opens up overseas markets, including the Middle East. I vividly remember feeling something beyond surprise — even fear — at a China where even a romance drama preaches tech ambition. Technological patriotism — the idea that when you are sanctioned you grit your teeth, and when you grit your teeth you are bound to prevail — is the true protagonist of the drama.
China's technological ambition does not stay within the fantasy of a drama. Semiconductors are the prime example. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's flagship DRAM maker, rose to No. 1 in market capitalization on the mainland as soon as it went public, and its war chest of more than 12 trillion won ($8.7 billion) is being poured into expanding production lines and developing high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), a player in NAND flash, has climbed to third in global shipments, overtaking Micron and Kioxia. What is notable is that these companies are no longer "cheap substitutes." PC makers such as HP and Asus have already begun putting their products into laptops, and even Apple — the world's most demanding customer — is considering Chinese firms as memory suppliers for the iPhone and Mac. On top of this, China has set out to develop on its own even the advanced lithography equipment that the United States had blocked. Performance still lags, but it is nothing short of shocking that China is opening, one by one, the locks the West had held shut.
China is completing a strategy of "changing lanes to overtake" (huandao chaoche) — going beyond merely chasing the car ahead by "bending the corner to overtake" (wandao chaoche). There is a grim resolve in it: to survive, you cannot follow the road others have taken ahead of you; you must switch roads and run. The United States has tied China down with regulations and a Western coalition is waging a strangulation campaign, but China is switching roads and running, fueled by a vast domestic market, enormous subsidies, and the war chest of its capital markets.
Having transformed from chaser to designer, China is a threat to Korea as well. There is optimism that Korean companies remain ahead in HBM, but the gap is narrowing. Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and SK hynix (000660.KS) have poured the profits they earn from commodity DRAM into developing advanced technology, and China is poised to take dead aim at that very market. If legacy memory is eroded by low-priced volume and profitability wavers, the first casualty is the war chest that must be spent on the HBM race. And if Huawei presses ahead with self-reliance in artificial intelligence (AI) chips through its Ascend series, Korea will be threatened on both fronts — memory and system chips.
President Lee Jae-myung recently called for a "blitzkrieg that goes beyond a speed campaign" regarding a semiconductor cluster in the Honam region. It was a demand to match the pace of Kumamoto in Japan, which went from groundbreaking to mass production in a little over two years. The same goes for the government's seven SEED projects, touted as the next growth engine after semiconductors. A blitzkrieg must be waged in areas such as small modular reactors (SMR), nuclear fusion, renewable energy, quantum, aerospace, and advanced bio. When the pace is slow, you get pushed aside by the trees others planted first — and lose even the ground to sow your own seeds.
The protagonist of "The Best Thing" cries out that "you have a future only if you hold the core technology." Desperation is what generates China's speed. What we need now is that same desperation. Unless we clear away the regulations that make it take 13 years just to lay a single power line, even the finest technology will miss its moment. A blitzkrieg unbacked by desperate action ends up as nothing more than a hollow slogan.
