Sometimes, it gets weird. In one sequence, the older woman even helps her son shower and brush his teeth. Wronged and disgusted, the young wife plots revenge. In a dramatic finale, she exposes her mother-in-law's bullying to her husband — or gives up on him and goes off on her own.
Over-the-top family dramas like these have helped turn bite-sized soaps into a $5 billion industry for the Chinese streaming giants. Now Beijing is cracking down on the scheme's alleged “inappropriate” plots about marital strife for fear they will damage the government's campaign to encourage families to stay together and have more children.
Growing official concern over the corrupting influence of micro-dramas will likely slow the industry's meteoric rise in China, experts say, and may accelerate studios' efforts to go global.
After two years in which production companies have sprung up across the country to take advantage of an emerging trend — sometimes relying on ChatGPT to produce scripts — the industry has reached a turning point, said Huang Zhongjun, a researcher in Zhejiang Normal University who has studied micro-dramas.
For Huang, the format has proven harmful to society in part because viewers are fed unrealistic plots that “insult people and increase conflict” within families. Young people, who spend more time with their screens than real people, are becoming “emotionally inadequate” and “unwilling to get married or have children,” he added.
Censors this month slammed mother-in-law dramas for straying from “core values” endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party. State media have since reported that the National Radio and Television Administration is conducting a nationwide review and will remove the unapproved titles by June 1.
As of 2020, Chinese streaming giants and TV studios have bet big on dramas that unfold in minutes overtaking slow-burn TV among young viewers. With the format's widespread appeal, they also see an opportunity to dominate global markets, as ByteDance-owned TikTok has done for short videos.
Writers and creators, many already attuned to the “invisible hand” of censorship, are starting to jump on international production teams, said Oscar Zhou, a lecturer in media studies at the University of Kent who researches the industry.
“Conventional family values are something the government cares a lot about,” Zhou said. “They try to use short dramas to push their own ideological agenda.”
That agenda includes more marriages and many more children as the country faces a demographic crisis that is fast becoming existential.
Since China's population began shrinking in 2022, officials have stepped up controls on “unhealthy” depictions of love and marriage in popular culture. At the same time, they have campaigned to encourage young couples to settle down and have children.
But this effort to spread “positive energy” around marriage and childbearing has repeatedly clashed with the changing ideals of young Chinese—particularly women—who have grown weary of government lectures on piety and family responsibility.
The battle over lifestyle choices is often played out in popular culture, leaving incumbents scrambling to take control of content aimed at young audiences using new media.
Ahead of Lunar New Year celebrations in February, young people making the annual pilgrimage home for the holiday flocked to an online game that mimicked “mysterious aunties” asking indiscreet questions about your love life. It was a hit – until it was scrapped.
A brief window of relative freedom for ultra-short dramas is now also closing.
The early days of the industry were an unbridled bonanza of content, as major tech companies invested in cheesy and schmaltzy shows in an attempt to attract subscribers. Streaming platforms would churn out dramas at such a rate that even China's well-trained censors struggled to keep up.
Now, the country's streaming giants will need to voluntarily censor themselves if they want to keep a piece of the $5 billion industry, analysts said.
After censors warned that the plots of series such as “My Husband is a Mama's Boy” were too “exaggerated” and negative, major Chinese short video platforms such as Douyin, China's version of TikTok, pledged to self-police content.
Bilibili, a rival service, announced it had removed hundreds of shows that “deviated from mainstream social values”.
The crackdown is just the latest example of China's censorship machine evolving to ensure that new forms of popular culture stay on the Communist Party's message.
In addition to licensing requirements introduced last year, the National Television and Radio Administration is developing new systems to streamline the review process so authorities can more easily classify and approve – or reject – content, Chinese state media reported.
Officials also frame the new measures as a way to prevent Big Tech from putting profit before the social good — an obsession of the Chinese leadership that has fueled widespread regulatory crackdowns on industries such as online classes, ride hailing and digital payments. recent years.
An official at the state television watchdog lamented that excessive speculation was preventing short dramas from evolving from “substandard” to true art.
“Our judgment is that currently short dramas are just products undergoing rapid development, but remain far from becoming high-quality works,” the official told state-run Shanghai Securities News, blaming “the widespread pursuit of commercial gain.”
