Lynn Pan, in her book “When True Love Came to China,” argues that romantic love, as understood in the Western European sense, began to take hold in China during the early 20th century, particularly around the time of the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement in the 1910s and 1920s. She ties this shift to a broader cultural transformation where traditional practices like arranged marriages and concubinage were increasingly rejected in favor of individual choice, monogamy, and a Western-inspired model of romantic love.

Pan highlights how this period saw Chinese intellectuals and writers, influenced by Western literature and ideas, begin to explore and articulate romantic love as a new gendered social construct, distinct from earlier Confucian notions of duty and familial obligation. This change was not instantaneous but has slowly gained momentum since the 1920s and has accelerated since the start of the 2000s as these modern concepts permeated deeper into Chinese society and literature.

Pan, L. (2015). When true love came to China. Hong Kong University Press.