2025/10/2 CRETA Seminar - Picking the "Right" Drama

Title：

2025/10/2 CRETA Seminar - Picking the "Right" Drama

Introduction：

This paper examines how government regulation shapes the ideological content of Chinese television dramas and how audiences respond. We use machine learning methods to construct two compatible ideology measures—political scores and commercial scores—and link them with viewership to capture both ideology exposure and ideology intake (exposure weighted by viewing). Before 2014, TV and online dramas were broadly similar in ideological content. After the post-2014 tightening, TV dramas showed higher political scores and lower commercial scores than online dramas, and the two dimensions act as complements: when commercial ideology declines, political ideology also decreases or remains unchanged. At the drama level, both commercial and political scores on television fell significantly. At the audience level, exposure to political ideology rose by about 4% while exposure to commercial ideology fell by about 4%, yet both ideology intakes declined sharply—roughly 18% (commercial) and 16% (political)—especially in wealthier prefectures. Beyond regulation, the industry shifted toward monopolistic competition after 2013, as the number of producers declined and the market share of leading and government-backed investors stabilized. Government investors, particularly TV channels, tended to produce dramas with higher political scores, reinforcing their role in ideological control through market dominance.

About speaker：

https://sites.google.com/view/beiqin