China’s War on Female Delusion — MAMA

China’s War on Female Delusion<br>CULTURE<br>An American Expat Describes the CCP’s Crackdown on Microdramas<br>By Nathan Baker · June 19, 2026 · 9 min read<br>China is cracking down on “microdramas” that depict the ultimate female fantasy: poor girls marrying rich CEOs. If you know anything about China’s censorship ecosystem, this doesn’t come as a surprise.<br>I had my own run-in with Chinese censors when I accidentally got chicks with big tits banned from car shows in Shanghai.<br>The Chinese government does not merely censor politics. It censors appetite. Sex, wealth, despair, femininity, masculinity, celebrity, fantasy, ambition, degeneracy, and the wrong kind of fun all pass through the same social harmony filter. The uncomfortable question is whether a society that censors degeneracy actually produces better behavior than one that turns every human weakness into a content vertical.<br>I built one of China’s first multi-channel networks in 2014 with Thoughtful Media Group. We grew channels on China’s YouTube-equivalent platforms. I eventually struck gold with a video called “The Beauties of ChinaJoy 2014” (CJ2014: 最性感的视频), which went viral on a video platform called Youku in July of that year.<br>ChinaJoy is the biggest gaming expo in China, notorious for scantily clad showgirls. The video was a musical compilation of all the booth babes, which I captured as b-roll for a separate comedy video we shot there (which performed nowhere near as well as the showgirl edit).<br>I was looking for ways to keep the momentum going, which brought me to a number of auto shows in Shanghai. I hit up China Auto Salon (CAS) in September 2014 and churned out more showgirl edits. That kept the buzz going. I went to the RA Shanghai International Automobile Customization and Modification Expo the next month, where the booth babes had even bigger tits.<br>But suddenly, a vibe shift.<br>In January 2015, reports emerged that Shanghai would ban sex models from upcoming auto shows. By April 2015, it was worldwide news. The male fantasy no longer had a place in the car-show scene. I realized I had myself played a part in this development.<br>All media in China is subject to the social harmony filter. If you were to stream Fight Club (1999) on the popular Tencent video platform, you’d find the iconic ending replaced with a note that says, “the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.”<br>Around the same time, China’s censors set out to suppress the male fantasy on TV. They removed the historical drama series, “The Empress of China,” from the air for squeezing too much cleavage out of Tang Dynasty costumes. Authorities required the entire series be re-edited for the sake of social harmony, resulting in a show composed entirely of close-up shots showing only the female character’s heads.<br>A decade later, China’s censors set their sights on dramatized hypergamy.<br>Now let me explain the concept of microdrama, known in Chinese as duanju (短剧). It’s like those AI Fruit Slop videos, but with real actors. The episodes usually run anywhere from under a minute to a few minutes. Engineered for vertical viewing, fast pacing, constant reversals, and cliffhangers that push you into the next episode. It’s the uncanny kind of scripted video you come across when swiping Reels or TikTok on the toilet. You end up feeling ashamed for watching all the way through just to see where it goes.<br>Marcus Lin (pseudonym), a media specialist in China, told me, “It’s super short content designed to keep people watching. Episodes always have some hook at the end. It’s a content model that’s already proven in China. It’s cheap to make, easy to test, and if something hits, it scales very fast. So people just keep producing more.”<br>Naturally, romance is a popular micro-drama category. And given female proclivities, rich love interests became a popular enough trope for the censors to take notice.<br>The CCP’s National Radio and Television Administration called on ​​creators to adhere to realism when producing short dramas that portray entrepreneurs, warning against producing sensational content that glorifies wealth, power, and elite lifestyles.<br>Current media guidelines warn against promoting “idealized narratives” that glamorize marrying into powerful or wealthy families, or narratives suggesting that a respectable or desirable man must be rich. Authorities see “unrealistic fantasies” as a danger to young women. The harmonious thing for women to do is focus on education or personal development, not focusing on their looks to bag a rich guy.<br>Lily Xu (pseudonym), a Chinese advertising executive, told me: “Microdramas have been trending since last year. The difference between TV dramas and microdramas is the story is usually far more dramatic, cheesy, and fast-paced. You don’t really need to use your brain to watch them, it’s pure escapist fantasy. I can’t really think of any negative aspects of...