LayarHijau.com – According to Sina News, actor Liu Yuning, born in 1990 and known on Weibo as @摩登兄弟刘宇宁, has seen a massive surge in followers after starring in the hit drama The Prisoner of Beauty (Mandarin title: 折腰, which literally means “to bend the waist”).
On May 13, when the series premiered, Liu Yuning’s Weibo followers stood at 19.506 million. By June 1, after the show concluded on Tencent Video, his follower count had jumped to 20.056 million — an increase of 550,000 followers in just 19 days.
Data from Maoyan shows that The Prisoner of Beauty has surpassed 800 million effective streams. The drama has repeatedly broken annual popularity records on the Tencent Video platform.
But the success of The Prisoner of Beauty isn’t limited to China. Since its debut on Netflix, the drama has entered the platform’s Top Ten rankings internationally. According to FlixPatrol data, it ranked second in Taiwan and third in Vietnam. In Indonesia, The Prisoner of Beauty claimed the eighth spot, making it the only Chinese drama to enter Netflix’s Top Ten in the country throughout May 2025.
Interestingly, the first person to “bend the waist” (a reference to the drama’s original Chinese title 折腰) was actually screenwriter Nan Zhen. In an interview with the public account “Yu Li” on June 1, Nan Zhen revealed that she was a fan of the original The Prisoner of Beauty novel. When writing the final version of the script, the male lead she envisioned already resembled Liu Yuning. “He was born with the aura of an emperor or general, standing tall and proud. His toughness and heroic spirit fit the role of Wei Shao perfectly,” Nan Zhen shared.
