Chinese micro-dramas grab global audience

The small screen has a big future. Over the past few years, China's micro-dramas — compact serials with clear themes, coherent story arcs and episodes typically under 15 minutes — have evolved from a domestic curiosity into a potent exportable cultural product. Born out of the short-video economy but now their own genre, these vertical-screen series have broken free of the tidy binaries that once governed international cultural exchanges. Theirs is a hybrid approach that mixes creative adaptation, platform engineering and an understanding of foreign audiences.

Put bluntly, micro-dramas are doing abroad what Chinese movies took more than a century to achieve at home — turning a medium into one that can carry and express Chinese cultural creativity on terms that work overseas. This should be seen as a change in mindset.

For years, China's external communication followed a "self-oriented" logic: pick domestic success stories, translate them and hope foreign audiences like them. That approach had its merits; much was learned and a steady stream of acclaimed series found audiences overseas. Yet the limits were obvious. Straight translations cannot always bridge cultural expectations or viewing habits. They treat the audience as a passive recipient rather than an active participant.

Micro-dramas have propagated a different logic overseas — call it the "self-and-other" approach. Creators now foreground the habits, tastes and viewing contexts of foreign viewers from the outset. That means building apps and platforms tuned to local usage, reworking scripts for local idioms and, where necessary, commissioning remakes that employ local actors and production styles. In short, we still provide Chinese cultural creativity, but we package it in forms the other side recognizes as its own.

This is not cultural surrender. It is strategic adaptation — the Chinese wisdom of "making good use of external things". By combining Chinese creative intellectual property with US-style applications and consumption habits, producers are not diluting their stories but ensuring they travel farther and appear truer to overseas audiences. The success of this approach is visible in the proliferation of overseas micro-drama apps, from ReelShort to GoodShort, FlexTV and ShortsTV, and in the popularity of remade titles that keep the emotional core of the original while applying local veneer.

The move from "content export" to "creative export" is critical. A transcript with subtitles can only go so far; a remake that understands what will move a US audience is a different matter altogether. A remake is not necessarily plagiarism; it is a form of cultural translation that treats an intellectual property as a seed rather than a complete plant. Hollywood has long resorted to remakes. Similarly, stories travel, are reshaped and flourish in new soil. China's micro-drama industry is learning the craft of adaptation and, in doing so, building a creative economy that can sustain long-term external engagement.

Micro-dramas are structurally poised to succeed. The global rise of mobile, vertical viewing, accelerated by platforms such as TikTok, has created a new grammar of attention. Vertical frames reshape not just viewing, but how directors compose shots and pace narratives. When the medium becomes the organ of perception, those who master it gain the power to shape meaning. Micro-dramas exploit that shift. Their production logic is mobile-first, their rhythm matches fragmented modern attention, and their viewing experience is intensely personal and portable.

It helps that China's film and television industry, further shaped under the strategic guidance of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), provides a mature infrastructure for the next step. Policy support has accelerated cross-sector integration and upgraded the value chain, strengthening production, distribution and cooperative studios that make creative export scalable. The industry has the producers, technical skill and creative confidence to create IPs that can be reworked for other markets. The pattern replicates the path films once followed: from import to localization to export.

Certain micro-drama themes resonate abroad. Remakes of the so-called "domineering CEO" stories, for example, have struck a chord with women viewers in the US. These quick, emotionally intense narratives offer what might be called "image therapy": brief, cathartic escapes from social anxieties. Rather than simply exporting Sino-centric values, these remakes reshape emotional forms that tap into widespread, cross-cultural yearnings — cultural influence achieved by meeting a felt need.

The creative export model helped fill the supply gaps in the US market during a period of industrial disruption. When strikes and structural anxieties led to content shortages, remade and platform-ready micro-drama content became a timely supplement. This reciprocal commerce builds mutual dependency and creates openings for further exchanges.

Looking ahead to the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period, the industry needs to perform two linked tasks. It must accelerate the leap from mediocre works to flagship productions and shift value from quick emotional payoffs to deeper cultural resonance. Prioritizing modern studio hubs — covering production, post-production, talent training and cultural services — will anchor long-term, integrated growth and support strategic overseas expansion. If industrialized and scaled successfully, this model could create a replicable "micro-drama plus" economy, merging production, tourism and cultural services into a modern, export-ready infrastructure.

None of this is a magic bullet. Cultural influence is slow and cumulative, and it must be cultivated patiently. Yet the early results are instructive. By changing the way we think about audiences, by exporting creativity rather than mere content, and by mastering the mobile grammar of the vertical screen, China's micro-dramas are carving out new space in global cultural conversation. If culture is soft power, then micro-dramas may prove to be among its most nimble instruments.

Zeng Long is a research fellow at the Center for APEC Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University; and Wu Hao is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of International Journalism and Communication of the same university.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.