Chinese TV producers rewrite the script for global streaming

(By Caixin journalist Guan Cong)

When a Chinese television producer pitched a suspense drama to Netflix two years ago, the pushback was unsparing.

Commissioning executives questioned whether the plot pushed creative boundaries, whether its cultural themes would resonate, and whether its production values met global standards. With an abundance of similar content already available, they asked why the platform should take a chance on a Chinese mainland title.

The producer left the meeting empty-handed. At the time, Chinese mainland dramas had established little commercial footprint on Western platforms, and global buyers remained sceptical.

That scepticism is now beginning to erode. In early September, Netflix disclosed that The Early Spring, a workplace romance set at a Beijing advertising agency, climbed to No. 2 on its weekly global chart for non-English television. Starring Jing Boran and Sun Qian, the series entered the top 10 across 22 countries and territories — including Indonesia, Brazil, and Qatar — while topping charts in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Vietnam.

It was the highest ranking ever achieved by a mainland Chinese drama on the global streaming platform.

The breakthrough underscores a broader structural transformation across China’s entertainment sector. Pinched by a cooling domestic market, shrinking margins and intensifying competition from low-budget micro-dramas, Chinese studios and video platforms are overhauling their international playbooks. Rather than dumping catalog titles in bulk onto overseas diaspora networks, they are pursuing direct streaming licensing, demanding higher fees, and investing in localized foreign remakes.

Moving beyond the discount bin

For years, Chinese television struggled to gain traction on mainstream international networks. During the domestic streaming boom a decade ago, surging subscriber growth and abundant capital at home led studios to treat overseas markets as an afterthought. Foreign distribution was largely outsourced to intermediaries who bought series in low-cost bundles and resold them to niche foreign channels catering to Chinese-speaking audiences.

Under that model, production companies had little say over broadcast timing and almost no visibility into viewership metrics. Years of depressed baseline prices eroded their bargaining power; some studios even distributed titles to foreign platforms for free simply to build brand awareness.

Mainstream foreign breakthroughs were rare. A person familiar with Chinese broadcasting policy noted that the 2009 family drama A Beautiful Daughter-in-law Era — which gained popularity on terrestrial television in the Middle East and Africa a decade after its domestic release — was an exception. In Europe and North America, Chinese dramas rarely reached beyond small expatriate audiences.

Official expectations have since evolved. Regulators initially welcomed any foreign broadcast, later encouraged commercial monetisation, and now push for both financial returns and cross-border cultural influence — a shift that has rendered legacy distribution channels obsolete.

The pricing disparity became glaringly apparent to Lu Yu, general manager of Linmon International, when he joined the overseas arm of Chinese production studio Linmon Media after seven years at a Hollywood talent agency. Lu noted that Chinese drama episodes were fetching as little as several hundred to a few thousand dollars abroad, even as Hollywood actors routinely collected residual checks for vintage series decades after their initial run.

Meanwhile, South Korean dramas — typically produced with fewer episodes and similar budgets — routinely command per-episode licensing fees three to ten times higher on the international market.

Shifting streaming dynamics have begun opening new doors. As Chinese platforms such as Tencent Video and iQiyi established regional footholds across Southeast Asia, producers began bypassing third-party brokers to negotiate directly with global buyers.

The format strategy

To move up the value chain, some studios are supplementing direct licensing by exporting studio-owned formats.

Unlike streaming platforms that commission works-for-hire, independent production houses such as Linmon and Daylight Entertainment retain full copyright ownership of their original catalogues. When Southeast Asian buyers sought to adapt Linmon’s 2020 domestic hit Nothing But Thirty, Lu resisted selling basic remake rights. Instead, the studio retained the underlying intellectual property, provided the script and production framework, co-invested in the local production, and secured back-end profit participation.

Thailand served as the regional testing ground. Benefitting from cultural proximity and broad reach across Southeast Asia, the market offered relatively low production costs. Lu’s team coordinated closely with local production houses — long accustomed to traditional lakorn soap operas — to position the remake as a differentiated, premium drama.

The hands-on approach paid off. In August 2025, Nothing But Thirty: Bangkok debuted on Disney+ in Thailand, while a Vietnamese remake, Breeze Over the Blue Sky, broadcast on Vietnam’s national network VTV3. Localised adaptations in Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan have all achieved profitability.

Streaming platforms are adopting a similar localised approach. In 2025, iQiyi’s Thai drama The Boy Who Met Ghosts, co-produced with local studio DMD, set ratings records on Thailand’s ONE31. Branded under the “iQIYI Original” label, the platform is also co-producing an adaptation of the popular Chinese web novel Fake Slackers.

Domestic squeeze fuels overseas push

The global expansion is being accelerated by mounting pressures at home. China’s long-form drama sector is contending with budget cuts, fewer project commissions, and audiences shifting toward fast-paced micro-dramas.

The producer previously turned down by Netflix said studio profit margins have fallen from previous highs of 40% to between 10% and 15%. Given extended payment terms across platforms and talent, a single commercial flop can endanger a production company’s cash flow.

Overseas expansion has offered a crucial buffer. While iQiyi has contended with domestic revenue declines, its international operations remain profitable. In the second quarter of 2026, the company’s overseas subscription revenue grew 40% year-on-year. In Thailand, data from mobile analytics firm SensorTower ranked Tencent Video, Netflix, and iQiyi as the country’s top three streaming platforms by monthly active users in 2025.

Chinese platforms are now looking beyond Asia. In the second quarter of 2026, iQiyi’s subscription revenue surged 215% in Brazil and 150% in Mexico, following global rivals into Latin America, where Amazon’s Prime Video committed US$2 billion to local production in August.

For executives like Lu, pure content licensing is only an opening phase. The long-term objective is producing local-language programming in overseas markets to build strategic positions before international competitors entrench themselves.

This article was first published by Caixin Global as “In Depth: Chinese TV Producers Rewrite the Script for Global Streaming”. Caixin Global is one of the most respected sources for macroeconomic, financial and business news and information about China.

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