Hundreds of millions are following the Qing Dynasty scheming and intrigue on China’s Netflix. Photo: Huanyu Film
China’s Netflix has a record-breaking hit on its hands. A 70-episode period drama about a quick-witted maidservant and a group of back-stabbing imperial concubines has set a single-day online viewership record in China – of more than half a billion people.
A total of 530 million views – which works out 38% of the population if everyone watched one episode – tuned in on August 12 to follow the scheming and intrigue on Netflix-like iQiyi, China’s biggest streaming platform. Controlled by search engine giant Baidu, iQiyi went public on the Nasdaq exchange in March. Continue reading →
The Chinese version of Saturday Night Live (周六夜现场 zhōu liù yè xiànchǎng) and 真相吧!花花万物 (zhēnxiàng ba! huāhuā wànwù — roughly, “Tell me the truth! Spending money on everything”), two variety shows exclusively on the video streaming platform Youku, have recently been taken down for no apparent reason.
真相吧!花花万物, a talk show hosted by Taiwanese celebrities Kevin Tsai 蔡康永 and Dee Hsu 徐熙娣, was found unavailable on July 13. The Beijing News reports (in Chinese) that Chinese SNL disappeared the next day. A Youku spokesperson did not respond to the paper’s request for comment. Continue reading →
Wang Ju, a contestant on the popular online Chinese talent show “Produce 101,” performing in the show’s finale on June 23.CreditVisual China Group, via Getty Images
BEIJING — For a moment, it looked as if China’s rigid beauty standards were on the brink of being upended — or at least expanded slightly.
“Produce 101,” a popular online talent show, puts women through their paces for one of 11 spots in a female pop band; at first, Wang Ju, a 25-year-old model manager who’d almost lost her place on the show earlier in the season, seemed an unlikely candidate for success. But over the course of a few weeks in June, Ms. Wang rode a mounting wave of public affection to find herself, as of midmonth, ranked second among the show’s 22 finalists. Suddenly, Chinese commentators were at pains to explain just how Ms. Wang — a woman Chinese media variously referred to as “stout,” “dark” and “not pretty enough” — got there. Continue reading →
Censorship of Chinese films and TV programs has been bad recently, and it’s about to get worse. That’s the takeaway from an internal document circulating in the Chinese entertainment industry.
In the document, the government encourages content that showcases “people’s happiness” and features important upcoming events, such as the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the PRC in 2019, and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s 100th anniversary in 2021. Continue reading →
Marx is indeed still relevant in China. R. D. Laing offered an elegant summary of his most pertinent doctrine:
Marx used the concept of mystification to mean a plausible misrepresentation of what is going on (process) or what is being done (praxis) in the service of the interests of one socioeconomic class (the exploiters) over or against another class (the exploited).
By representing forms of exploitation as forms of benevolence, the exploiters bemuse the exploited into feeling at one with their exploiters, or into feeling gratitude for what (unrealized by them) is their exploitation, and, not least, into feeling bad or mad even to think of rebellion.
“Marx Got It Right,” a new TV show, is among the Communist Party’s attempts to reach a younger audience.CreditChina Central Television
BEIJING — Regal orchestral music strikes up, a computer-animated train races by and an old man with a bushy white beard looms onto the television screen. Then the studio audience applauds as an effervescent host opens an episode of China’s latest prime-time entertainment.
It looks like another Chinese talk show, but the bearded man is Karl Marx. This is “Marx Got It Right,” a slickly produced program that is part talk show, part indoctrination session — and a vivid illustration of the quirky efforts that the Communist Party under Xi Jinping is making to win over China’s millennials. Continue reading →
Chinese sci-fi fans are bubbling over with excitement today following a report that beloved science fiction trilogy “The Three-Body Problem” may be made into a high-budget television series by Amazon.
The Financial Times reported yesterday that the American video subscription service will likely earmark $1 billion in order to acquire the rights to the extremely popular trilogy of novels written by Liu Cixin and produce three seasons of episodes. Continue reading →
As the annual meeting of the country’s legislature stretched into its second week, the event’s canned political pageantry and obsequious (and often scripted) media questions seemingly proved too much for one journalist on Tuesday.
With a fellow reporter’s fawning question to a Chinese official pushing past the 30-second mark, Liang Xiangyi, of the financial news site Yicai, began scoffing to herself. Then she turned to scrutinize the questioner in disbelief. Continue reading →
Fire and fury. (Youtube/Zhejiang TV official channel)
Almost two decades ago, Wang Xi, then a teenager living near the Chinese capital of Beijing, fell in love with an American robot combat TV show called BattleBots. One of the most-watched TV shows ever in the US, it got 1.5 million viewers per episode at its peak, and was syndicated around the world, including China.
Wang knew then that he wanted to one day make his own robot, and having it battle on TV in China. This year, Wang saw his dream realized on China’s first robot combat show, King of Bots (铁甲雄心), which debuted in January. It’s one of a series of robot combat shows that will air in the country this year, after China saw its first offline robot battle tournaments in recent years.
Wang’s robot, Greedy Snake, fought robots made by other teams from China, as well as from the UK and the US. The show, which aired on the widely-watched Zhejiang TV channel, quickly became popular. Its Feb. 26 episode ranked in the second spot for entertainment shows across 52 cities in its time slot, behind a Chinese remake of a trivia competition, according to research firm CSM (link in Chinese).
Wang, who was working as a game developer, is now a technical consultant to the show, said the show was inspired by the revival of BattleBots, starting in 2015. But China’s promotion of itself in recent years as a nation at the forefront of technology and innovation likely played a role too.
Popular Chinese reality TV shows have often been dominated by singing or dance competitions. In 2017, one of China’s most popular TV reality shows, The Rap of China, garnered a combined 2.7 billion views for the season and turned dozens of young contestants into stars, while another widely watched show focused on reciting classical Chinese poetry. The robot shows represent a change for reality TV programming, and come as China seeks to advance its technological prowess, from vowing to be a leader in artificial intelligence in 2030 to investing more in industrial robots for automation. Last year, a show that had humans compete against AI technologies in a variety of challenges—such as facial recognition—debuted in August.
While King of Bots had its season finale Monday (March 5), later this month, iQiyi, a streaming-service giant backed by China’s search giant Baidu, is planning to air a similar show called Clash Bots on March 23. Youku, another online video platform backed by Alibaba, is also rolling out This is Bots later this year, though a date hasn’t been set yet. The companies didn’t reply to queries about the programs from Quartz.
In King of Bots, competitors pit remote-controlled bots against each other in a container made of bulletproof glass. During a three-minute fight, each team needs to try to paralyze the other’s machine in order to win the game. Participants also need to navigate their bots to dodge traps in the competition stadium, including rivets on the wall, flames that burst from the ground, serrated rollers, and flipping platforms.
The bots caught on fire during a competition. (Courtesy of The Makers)
Competing teams, including those from the UK, the US, and Australia, all received a handsome amount of financial support from the show. In Wang’s case, he received some 200,000 yuan ($32,000) to make his bot, a tanker-like 110-kilogram (242 lbs) machine (on left, photo below) that lifts its opponent and hurls it down. The team, which included his wife, spent six months designing the robot, which was manufactured in Shanghai.
A total of 48 teams (link in Chinese) participated. Wang said he found the foreign teams more experienced in combat strategy and design because countries like the UK and the US have a longer history in robot combat events than China. Wang’s bot lost in the competition for one of the top eight spots to another Chinese team.
A team from Britain’s Brentwood high school and Wang Xi, center, with two members of his team.(Courtesy of Wang Xi)
Yet, he notes, the show provided a platform for people obsessed with making robots, and a way to gauge their skill level. “If a country wants to rejuvenate and even lead the world, we should be counting on the attitude of pursuing knowledge and science,” Wang said.
Before the TV show, most teams were only competing offline, said Wang, who founded China’s biggest robot combat association in 2015. Now the group has more than 1,000 members. Wang estimates that there are around 300 people skilled enough to make a robot capable of competing and fighting.
One of them might be Yue Tan, an electronics engineering major in southern Guangdong province, who is making a 13.6-kilogram (30 lbs) bot that he hopes will compete in an offline competition hosted by the show’s co-producer, Shanghai-based video firm The Makers, starting in May. “Children can explore and build up confidence through making robots. Even if you fail, you will learn to improve during the process,” says Yue, who’s been discussing robot-making tips on Zhihu (link in Chinese), China’s answer to Quora.
Others also believe that the TV shows can encourage innovation. Chen Wei, the producer of iQiyi’s upcoming Clash Bots, expects that the show will boost young people’s aspirations for Chinese manufacturing and technology.“China is still lagging in some industry sectors,” Chen told news portal Chinanews. “If the game becomes popular and more people get inspired by it, our technology will probably also improve.”
The Chinese robot makers may have a ways to go. While two Chinese teamsmade it to the quarter-finals, a team from the UK (link in Chinese) eventually won the competition and half a million yuan (nearly $79,000) in prize money in the season finale.
Beijing on Thursday said it was against any form of racism but dismissed widespread criticism of state broadcaster CCTV’s annual holiday variety show as an attempt to drive a wedge between China and African nations.
We need to talk about that Africa skit. You know the one.
Let me say up front that it’s dangerous and somewhat irresponsible to analyze a Chinese production — particularly one intended solely for a Chinese audience, whose understanding of ethnicity and race is filtered through a complicated and unique culture and history — through a purely American lens. I’ve watched this skit carefully, and I can’t find any intent to offend. Which is to say, there’s no real need to call it racist.
But this skit is clearly offensive — to sensibility, to foreigners, to intelligence, to one’s self-respect. To theater. To creativity. It is condescending, and willfully so, making it all the more offensive. It is arrogant and tone-deaf and shallow. It’s hard not to be embarrassed. Continue reading →
Second-century military strategist Zhuge Liang has been depicted as being “so wise that he was practically a demon”, at least according to writer Lu Xun. Fictionalized in the 14th-century novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of China’s “Four Classics,” “Zhuge” has since become a byword for wisdom in China.
Given the renown of the character, it’s a tall order for any actor to play Zhuge without fans criticizing one detail or another. A recent TV series may have found the answer—with a Zhuge who happens to know English. Continue reading →
From historical dramas to military series – a list of the latest, most-watched television dramas in China shows that Chinese television dramas are not just hot & happening – they are also diverse when it comes to themes and genres.
It has been over 27 years since China’s first television drama aired and caused a national craze. Although China’s media industry has greatly changed through the times, one thing has remained the same: Chinese TV viewers still love watching television dramas – a dominant form of media entertainment. In fact, the Chinese TV drama industry is booming and among the most vibrant in the world, with no signs of slowing down. Continue reading →
Day and Night, an online crime drama, broadcast the finale on Oct 11. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
As Chinese viewers spend more time on video websites, network dramas are booming both in quantity and in quality.
The year looks like the golden time for domestic crime shows. Audience taste has shifted from time-travelling heroines with embroidered garments to rigorous-thinking detectives tracking serial killers.
Well-made internet series sprung up like mushrooms after the screening of summer blockbusters. Day and Night, Burning Ice, Line Walker II are three of the most popular ones recently released on video sites Youku, iQiyi, and QQ Live respectively.
Audience-oriented scripts, broad online exposure, and handpicked cast help network crime shows gain a strong viewership.
Day and Night, widely reckoned as the best crime drama of the year, got a total of 24.6 billion hits online by this Thursday. Continue reading →
