According to reports from relevant media, during the Spring Festival, Hengdian World Studios, as a base for Chinese repair-style spiritual opium production, still had many short film crews rushing to complete their work, with some aiming to hit the Spring Festival box office. According to incomplete statistics from Times Finance, during the Spring Festival, over 400 short dramas were released on platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Hongguo Short Films, long video platforms, and major TV stations, providing a glimpse into the current state of the Chinese repair short drama industry, which is now in a state of intense competition. Chinese repair short dramas have also become popular in recent years.
“In the current world, all culture or literary arts belong to a certain class and belong to a certain political line. Art for art’s sake, art that transcends class, and art that runs parallel to or independently of politics, in fact, do not exist.” Since the revival of Chinese capitalism, the Chinese literary and artistic circles have been firmly controlled by the bourgeoisie.
Since the revival, Chinese repair has produced a large number of TV dramas to smear the Cultural Revolution, beautify its rule, promote Confucian family values, and serve decadent bourgeois ideology of indulgence and pleasure. With overproduction, more capitalists have invested in the commercial sector, leading to increasingly fierce competition. Commercial capital does not create surplus value but merely divides the surplus value generated by industrial capital. According to the law of average profit, the total profit of all commercial capital is fixed, but individual commercial capitals with faster turnover can obtain more surplus value transferred from industrial capital and can achieve the goal of squeezing out other commercial capitals, much like many people dividing a limited cake—if each person cuts the same size piece each time (under the law of average profit, equal capital earns equal profit), then the faster someone cuts the cake, the more they can eat. In capitalist competition, the faster the capital turnover, the more surplus value is divided, so commercial capitalists are eager to accelerate capital turnover. As a result, short video platforms emerged in the film and television industry to compete for the surplus value transferred from traditional film and TV capitalists. Competition is not limited to the same industry—since the film industry is also a form of artistic creation, it must compete with gaming, novels, and other industries for profits. The entire artistic creation sector must also compete with other commercial capitals, which in turn compete with industrial capital and lending capital, and ultimately with international competitors.
As the economic crisis deepens, the proletariat becomes increasingly impoverished, small bourgeoisie go bankrupt more frequently, and class and gender conflicts become more acute. Chinese repair, which carries the ideological baggage of the bourgeoisie, plays a role in numbing oppressed classes and oppressed women’s consciousness of struggle, thus vigorously supporting the short drama industry.
“Thoughts of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of every era. This means that a class is the dominant material force in society, and also the dominant spiritual force. The class that controls the means of material production also controls the means of spiritual production. Therefore, the thoughts of those without spiritual production are generally controlled by the ruling class.” As a result, the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie, being spontaneously controlled by bourgeois ideology, have no choice but to be arbitrarily indoctrinated with reactionary ideas by the bourgeoisie. The current popularity of short dramas is a clear manifestation of their being numbed by bourgeois spiritual opium.
“The commodification of artistic production integrates art into the track serving capitalist rule. As the bourgeoisie declines, the art that belongs to this rule also completely loses its active role in advancing history.” (Basic Problems of Marxist Literary Theory, p340) To accelerate capital turnover, bourgeoisie exploit the short episode length of short dramas—just a few minutes—by using “fast-paced, highly reversed” plot settings to increase the dosage of spiritual opium in a short time, further poisoning the oppressed proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. According to the China Internet Audio-Visual Association’s White Paper on the Development of the Micro-Short Drama Industry (2024), the user base of micro-short dramas has reached 576 million, accounting for 52.4% of the total internet users, with a market size projected at 50.44 billion yuan. Platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, early entrants in the short drama industry, benefit from shorter shooting cycles and faster capital turnover, thus earning more profits. Seeing the profitability of the short drama industry, other capitalists also rushed in. Long video platforms such as Tencent Video, iQiyi, Mango TV followed suit, along with e-commerce platforms like Taobao, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Meituan, and Ele.me crossing over into short dramas. Baidu also applied to register the “Baidu Short Drama” trademark and is vigorously developing short drama business.
And “Capitalist production is hostile to certain sectors of spiritual production, such as art and poetry.” “Once money becomes the axis of artistic production, art production will depend on the nature of money under the capitalist system.” (Basic Problems of Marxist Literary Theory, p341) These toxic short dramas, to quickly complete capital turnover and earn surplus value, have cut down on the necessary plot development from early TV dramas, uniformly satisfying petty bourgeois viewers’ increasingly severe spiritual emptiness and individualism through repeated face-slapping and plot reversals, even surpassing in vulgarity in areas like pornography and violence, and are even more artistically inferior.
“Because women suffer particularly severe oppression, the opium dose injected into them by capitalist society is also particularly large.” Most of these petty bourgeois viewers are women. During last year’s Spring Festival, a short drama called “I Became a Stepmother in the 80s” became popular. This drama painted a flattering picture of China’s initial capitalist revival, singing praises for capitalists engaging in speculation and getting rich in rural areas, beautifying them as “respectful to women” and “good men” who do not treat women as reproductive tools, and instilling reactionary ideas of being a good family slave into women. The production of this stinking bourgeoisie’s profits was enormous. This year’s Spring Festival short dramas also featured various “costume idol dramas,” “urban emotional dramas,” and “family ethics dramas,” which, during the New Year, ruthlessly injected a dose of reactionary ideas of “family harmony and prosperity” and submissiveness to men into women, continuing to corrupt women’s resistance consciousness.
In capitalist society, the short drama industry, as a decayed industry producing spiritual opium, deceives people’s wealth and should be eliminated. The oppressed proletariat, petty bourgeoisie, and women should not let their fighting spirit be dulled by poorly made, low-ideology short dramas, but instead focus on the actual class struggle, recognizing that these spiritual opium producers—the bourgeoisie—oppress them economically and also seek to numb them culturally with spiritual opium. They must cut off their obsession with spiritual opium and bravely participate in the socialist revolution.
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