Micro-Drama as Soft Power: China's Short-Drama Export Pipeline and U.S. Policy
Filming site of a micro drama at the Shanghai International Short Video Center in Shanghai. Source: Xinhua
By Nu'a Bon
The Gate
The episode begins mid-breath: a woman turns, a door opens, a sentence hangs in the air—then the screen cuts to black. A button rises: UNLOCK NEXT. A countdown starts, as if the narrative was a subway train you might miss. Beneath it sit coins, bundles, a subscription. To learn what happens next, you have to pay.
This is duǎnjù (短剧), Chinese vertical micro-drama: 60- to 90-seconds per episode, monetized through micropayments and built for mobile-first viewing. Series run dozens to hundreds of episodes, and cliffhangers function as purchase prompts. Instead of paying for a show, the viewer is paying for what happens next, one locked segment at a time.
In 2024, China's domestic duǎnjù market exceeded 50 billion yuan (approximately US$7 billion) in gross consumer spending on short-drama platforms, surpassing the country's theatrical box office for the first time. [1] As of 2026, the model has expanded across South Korea, Southeast Asia, and the United States—where revenues reached an estimated US$819 million in 2024 and are projected to rise to US$3.8 billion by 2030. [2]
Western policymakers have spent years treating TikTok as the paradigmatic Chinese platform threat: a data-harvesting operation that might surveil users or manipulate feeds. That framing captures real risks, but it narrows the aperture. While Washington debates data flows, a parallel export system is scaling: app-based narrative pipelines that combine distribution, payments, and optimization into a single habit machine.
China's micro-drama export ecosystem functions as cultural infrastructure capable of shaping core beliefs around authority and agency at scale. As of now, the United States lacks both the policy frameworks and the institutional capacity to respond. Though China-linked firms might know much about American users, the real issue is which stories enter American leisure time, through what chokepoints, and with what conversion logic—the platform-economic rationale by which narrative events are engineered to trigger transactions.
The Export Pipeline
The global entertainment industry in 2026 is defined by a structural asymmetry: the contraction of traditional production hubs alongside the rapid expansion of micro-dramatic industries across Asia. In South Korea, short-form content rose from 58 percent of the most frequently consumed video formats in 2023 to over 70 percent in 2024. [3] Thailand and Vietnam have become rapid-turn production centers for global platforms, with industry reporting indicating that entire seasons are routinely delivered in under seven days. [4] In Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, where mobile-first media consumption is growing fastest, China-linked short-drama apps have entered markets with little incumbent competition. Where Hollywood still optimizes for theatrical events and prestige seasons, duǎnjù optimizes for throughput: content designed to be consumed continuously, priced in small increments, and tuned to retention metrics.
The infrastructure of duǎnjù is not invisible. It consists of repeatable corridors. A teaser in a social feed drives an install. The install routes through an app store. The show routes through in-app purchases. Viewing behavior routes through recommender systems and analytics. Each step is a chokepoint—invisible to the user but consequential for governance: app stores govern distribution and payment terms; advertising intermediaries mediate acquisition; analytics Software Development Kits (SDKs) render behavior legible to operators. Chinese platforms are architecturally similar to Western-developed apps; they recruit through the same advertising exchanges and in-app purchase infrastructure that govern every other app on the device.
Generative AI is the connective tissue linking production speed and distribution. AI voice tools and automated lip synchronization have cut weeks of dubbing and subtitling down to days or hours. [5] AI-assisted editing automates rough cuts and scene detection, compressing post-production timelines. A drama produced in Mandarin today can be adapted for multiple markets far faster than legacy pipelines allowed. Most consequentially, micro-drama platforms collect and use audience data to ensure that cliff placement, emotional pacing, and compression are tuned to maximize micro-transaction revenue.
Beyond being simply shorter content that takes advantage of shorter attention spans and addictive storylines, it is also a transformation of dramaturgy into conversion architecture: suspense calibrated to predictable intervals, emotion standardized for continuation, moral conflict simplified into rapid accounting. When variation is cheap, narrative becomes modular. Lost in the optimized narrative structure is artistic subtlety and time. Older serial forms allowed for slack: ambiguity, scenes that do not “convert,” moments that deepen character development without immediate payoff. The micro-drama's economic structure punishes that slack. Viewers pay for escalation on schedule, even as the system is designed to defer closure indefinitely.
The Asymmetric Exchange Fantasy
What ideology travels through the micro-drama pipeline? Romance, especially organized around radical status differences, dominates a significant majority of top-performing titles on the duǎnjù market. [6] The typical storyline follows an ordinary protagonist, often a woman, who encounters a figure of extraordinary wealth, power, or status and who is able to recognize her hidden worth. The fantasy reflects contemporary economic precarity, in which downward mobility haunts educated youth and in which “lying flat” (tǎng píng) has emerged as a generational posture in China and across Asia. [7]
Call this the “asymmetric exchange fantasy”: narrative structures that promise recognition, elevation, and security through encounters with a wealthy, benevolent power rather than through collective action or structural reform. The chief executive falls for the delivery worker. The immortal protector descends. The hidden heir avenges humiliation. These stories naturalize a worldview in which individual virtue is rewarded by exceptional patrons, while systemic change remains offstage.
Asymmetric-exchange fantasies are hardly unique to China. Hollywood has produced them for a century, from Cinderella adaptations to the Hallmark catalog. What distinguishes the duǎnjù export system is its combination of four features: the unprecedented scale of algorithmic distribution; the micropayment structure that ties narrative continuation to spending; the AI-driven optimization that tunes story beats to conversion metrics; and the foreign-state-linked ownership that places governance terms outside U.S. regulatory reach.
Research cautions against assuming a simple correlation between entertainment consumption and consumer viewpoints. [8] Can individual dramas change minds? Perhaps, but the core question is whether these algorithmically curated narrative environments can shape core assumptions about security and injustice—where security is provided by a protector and injustice is resolved by patronage rather than by institutions. Such soft power works without turning viewers “pro-China” as it only needs to normalize certain beliefs about protector power, individual rescue, and hierarchical benevolence—while making other solutions feel implausible.
Cultural Infrastructure and the Vacuum
China's Belt and Road Initiative built ports, railways, and telecommunications networks across the Global South. The duǎnjù ecosystem represents an analogous project in the cultural register: narrative infrastructure that creates dependency, shapes taste, and establishes China-linked firms as default providers of mobile-native entertainment. The analogy is more than metaphorical. Physical infrastructure creates lock-in through sunk costs and standards; narrative infrastructure creates lock-in through habit, format expectations, and platform incumbency.
Whether this expansion is centrally directed by the Chinese state, structurally enabled by it, or simply benefiting from a permissive industrial environment is, for governance purposes, a secondary question. The pipeline operates at scale, under foreign-state-linked ownership, with chokepoints outside U.S. regulatory reach. The policy challenge is the same regardless of which model best describes the intent behind it.
This expansion has coincided with American retreat. In 2025, executive decisions dramatically reduced funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, placing much of the Voice of America workforce on administrative leave and terminating grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. [9] Their contraction creates a predictable outcome: a thinning of U.S. narrative reach in contested media environments. Hollywood, meanwhile, continues to self-censor in pursuit of Chinese box-office access, even as its domestic production infrastructure contracts. The result is a U.S. soft-power vacuum.
In the Global South, where American cultural presence once counterbalanced Chinese economic influence, that presence is thinning. Chinese-language platforms increasingly dominate media consumption in diaspora communities. Within the U.S. market itself, short-drama apps recruit viewers through interfaces that make the national origin of content easy to ignore. For most users, the relevant fact is simply that the next episode is one tap away. Why does this matter for national security and statecraft? Because cultural systems shape baseline assumptions about legitimacy, agency, and authority. Influence tends to arrive as normalization.
The American private sector has begun to respond. In October 2025, Fox Entertainment took an equity stake in the Ukrainian platform Holywater, committing to produce more than 200 vertical series. Disney selected DramaBox for its 2025 Accelerator program for media start-ups. Former executives from ABC, Showtime, and Miramax have launched competing ventures for short-story platforms. [10] Yet these efforts underline America's contending asymmetry and slow start. American startups budget US$100,000–$200,000 per series and plan launches in mid-2026. ByteDance, by contrast, has refined short-drama infrastructure for years: in early 2026, it began testing PineDrama, a standalone micro-drama app in the United States and Brazil, positioned as free and operating as a loss-leader while competitors remain in development. [11] Netflix's response has been cautious: vertical video experiments for mobile discovery, while emphasizing the company was “not competing” with short-drama platforms. Private-sector catch-up cannot easily match the speed, scale, or loss tolerance of an ecosystem shaped by China's domestic production capacity and regulatory backing. Policy intervention is needed in tandem with market competition, but the U.S. Congress has seldom passed legislation to promote or influence Hollywood production.
Policy Recommendations
Washington already treats the ownership and governance of high-scale software deployments as strategic infrastructure. Soft-power platforms, like short-form dramas, warrant comparable scrutiny as distribution-and-monetization infrastructures capable of shaping attention at scale. An outright ban is unlikely to be feasible across proliferating apps, would raise substantial First Amendment objections, and has proven hard to implement (i.e., the U.S. TikTok ban in 2025). The policy goal should be narrower: encourage transparency, govern chokepoints, build constraints on extractive design, and invest in independent analysis.
Platform transparency. Congress should require ownership and control disclosure for foreign-owned streaming platforms operating in the United States, including clear disclosure of pay-to-continue features and the main parameters of recommender systems. This model mirrors Article 27 of the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires platforms to disclose the criteria their recommenders optimize for and to offer a non-profiling-based alternative. [12]
Cultural infrastructure review. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) reviews acquisitions that threaten national security; its trigger is a transaction. Congress should establish a parallel mechanism whose trigger is operational reach rather than ownership change: a review activated when a foreign-controlled narrative distribution system exceeds a threshold of domestic use—for instance, one million monthly active U.S. users—and combines distribution, in-app purchases, and behavioral measurement. Unlike CFIUS, which assesses a discrete deal, this mechanism would conduct ongoing assessment of platforms already operating in-market, with disclosure obligations and potential mitigation agreements analogous to those CFIUS imposes on cleared transactions. The trigger is the conjunction of these features as opposed to the nature of the content alone.
Consumer protection. The micropayment mechanics of duǎnjù apps—coin bundles, disappearing discounts, cliffhanger-as-purchase-prompt—may already fall within the Federal Trade Commission's authority over deceptive and manipulative design. The FTC should consider examining pay-to-continue architecture and placing guardrails where minors are users.
Research and media literacy. The National Science Foundation and the Department of Education should fund independent, peer-reviewed research on soft-power dynamics in short-form streaming, including systematic content analysis of globally distributed duǎnjù and its reception contexts. The Department of Education, in coordination with state-level curricula frameworks, should consider integrating media-literacy modules that address algorithmic curation and AI-localized content into existing digital-citizenship standards, drawing on models such as the digital-literacy provisions in Finland's national curriculum.
Allied coordination. Given the expansive reach of duǎnjù apps, the United States should work with allies on cultural infrastructure governance. Drawing on the E.U.'s DSA framework for recommender transparency and the U.K.'s Online Safety Act for systems-and-processes obligations, allies can develop shared disclosure standards that reduce regulatory arbitrage. [13]
Conclusion
For years, China has leveraged its resources to support infrastructure buildout to advance its strategic influence. Roads carry goods, but also dependency. Ports enable trade, but also leverage. Narrative operates the same way. Stories carry worldviews, and the platforms that distribute them shape what populations can imagine.
For decades, the United States dominated the global popular narrative. That dominance was not always innocent, but it was legible: produced in identifiable studios, distributed through known channels, subject to public critique. The duǎnjù economy is different. It is algorithmically distributed, AI-localized, optimized for retention, and scaling faster than regulators can track.
Policymakers who fixate on TikTok's data practices while ignoring its cultural counterparts are addressing only half the challenge. The question is whether China-linked systems will increasingly shape what Americans are trained to want.
About the author
Nu’a Bon is an artist and writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They have taught at the School of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University and the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. Their research examines platform economies, cultural infrastructure, and soft power in the Asia-Pacific region.
Endnotes
[1] China Netcasting Services Association, “Annual Report on China's Online Audiovisual Content Industry,” Beijing: CNSA, 2025; Media Partners Asia, “Micro-Drama Strategic Report,” Hong Kong: Media Partners Asia, September 2025. The 50-billion-yuan figure represents gross consumer spending on short-drama platforms; the theatrical box-office comparison uses the same metric category from the China Film Administration.
[2] Media Partners Asia, “Micro-Drama Strategic Report”; Sensor Tower, “State of Short Drama Apps 2025,” Sensor Tower, 2025. The $3.8 billion figure is a market projection and should be read accordingly.
[3] Patrick Brzeski, “Micro-Drama Genre Booms in Asia as Top Apps Surpass 150M Active Users,” Deadline, April 4, 2025.
[4] Meg James, “Hollywood's Romance with Micro-Dramas Is Heating Up,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2025; Travis Clark, “Inside the Chinese Short-Drama Machine,” Business Insider, March 28, 2024. Both report production cycles of three to seven days for short-drama series targeting global platforms.
[5] Research and Markets, “Global AI Dubbing Market Report 2024–2034,” 2024.
[6] Systematic data on duǎnjù genre distribution remains limited, but industry analyses from Media Partners Asia and Sensor Tower consistently identify romance and status-asymmetry narratives as the dominant categories on export platforms. For a scholarly account of the genre's domestic antecedents, see Jing Wang, The Other Digital China: Nonconfrontational Activism on the Social Web (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
[7] Yun Zhou, “Lying Flat as Feedback: Understanding the Discourse Behind China's Slowdown,” Made in China Journal 6, no. 2, 2021, pp. 102–108.
[8] The cultivation-theory tradition, originating with George Gerbner, posits that cumulative media exposure shapes perceptions of social reality. For a recent meta-analysis, see James Shanahan and Michael Morgan, Television and Its Viewers: Cultivation Theory and Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On parasocial relationships and political attitudes in streaming contexts, see Sohyun Park and Wei Wang, “Parasocial Relationships and Political Engagement in Mobile Entertainment,” Journal of Communication 73, no. 4, 2023, pp. 312–330.
[9] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Trump Signs Executive Order for Major Cuts to Seven Agencies, Including RFE/RL Overseer USAGM,” March 15, 2025; Center for Strategic and International Studies, “RFA and VOA Shutdown: The Erosion of U.S. Soft Power in Southeast Asia,” April 2, 2025.
[10] Cynthia Littleton, “Fox Entertainment Invests in Ukrainian App Start-Up Holywater,” Variety, October 9, 2025; Alex Weprin, “The Microdrama Production Gold Rush Is Here,” Hollywood Reporter, November 5, 2025.
[11] Sarah Perez, “TikTok Quietly Launches a Microdrama App Called ‘PineDrama,’” TechCrunch, January 16, 2026. On ByteDance's consolidation of short-drama operations, see FoxData, “ByteDance's Next Global Hit After TikTok? Inside the Meteoric Rise of Hongguo Short Drama App,” 2025.
[12] European Union, “Digital Services Act, Article 27 (“Recommender System Transparency”).” For analysis of how Article 27 creates baseline disclosure obligations, see “DSA Decoded #10: Algorithmic Transparency under the DSA,” Freshfields Technology Quotient, February 6, 2026.
[13] Ofcom, “Roadmap to Regulation: Ofcom's Approach to Implementing the Online Safety Act,” https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/roadmap-to-regulation.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of the editors or the journal.