Of all the US’s export successes, surely its most pervasive is the soft-power export of culture. Movies, TV, music, etc And as much as China has surged to take every other ‘top exporter’ world crown, it’s hard to imagine it taking the culture crown too, or is it?

Micro-dramas are not as big in the West as they are in China, where they generate twice as much revenue as movies. Micro-dramas have immense production cost advantages: the cost per minute of footage for AI micro-dramas is roughly 1,000 yuan ($140, https://yicai.com/news/103084978.html) while a typical Netflix drama costs $5M to $10M per hour-long episode, so $85,000 to $170,000 a minute. In other words, it’s roughly a thousand times cheaper to produce. Furthermore producing localized versions in Thai, Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, etc is trivially cheap.

State Administration of Radio, Film and Television: 430,000 short dramas were launched in the first eight months of this year, 13 times the total for the whole of last year, and AI dramas accounted for more than 90%