The origin of the Chinese microdrama

A bit delayed on this, but I wrote a piece in the New Yorker last week about the origin of microdramas, these bit-sized vertically oriented shows for the TikTok era that, by my estimate, has been viewed by a tenth of humanity. Several Hollywood studios have started their own ventures and so it’s looking like this new medium may be here to stay.

It’s definitely not just a fad in China, where a lot of producers have pivoted from the horizontal format to vertical. A lot of these dramas get created in Hengdian, the big movie studio lot, and put up on platforms like TikTok. This has resulted in a fascinating cultural phenomenon where Chinese production teams hire (mostly) white actors and bring them to China (some of these productions are done in Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, etc.)

I visited Hengdian when it was teeming with microdrama crews but a month later, I had heard that the number of productions in Hengdian dropped by 75% because a lot of these companies started pivoting to AI.

Many Chinese companies are now using ByteDance Seedance, a video generator, instead of human actors to make their drama. In China, the competition is so fierce that adopting new technologies in your work is treated as a necessity of survival. (There’s no time to think about the social consequences. If you don’t embrace it your competitors will.) What’s interesting is that Chinese also recognize that Americans, and Europeans for that matter, don’t think that way, and so one of the companies I wrote about FlareFlow has adopted separate AI use policies for domestic and overseas audiences. Microdrama are becoming a mirror of an interesting cultural rift in attitudes toward AI.

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