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ReelShort is the latest Chinese export to conquer America

A producer of soapy micro-series is a surprise hit

Nov 23, 2023, The Economist

A show called “Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress” dives head first into a seedy melee of passion and betrayal. Within the first 30 seconds of the micro-series, which consists of 55 two-minute episodes, a woman named Joyce is forced to give her husband’s lover a blood transfusion in order to save the mistress’s life. The first ten minutes depict coerced marriages, inheritance battles and sundry infidelities. The storyline is choppy and nearly impossible to follow. To say the acting is hammy would be generous.

American viewers can tune in to dozens of similar rapid-fire dramas, with titles such as “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” and “Son-in-Law’s Revenge”, on an app called ReelShort. If it all seems a bit foreign, then that is because it is. ReelShort is owned by COL Group, a digital publisher based in Beijing. Some of its shows are adapted by Chinese teams at COL’s Californian subsidiary, Crazy Maple Studio, from Chinese scripts that were first written and produced for audiences in China.

That does not stop Americans from lapping them up. On November 11th ReelShort briefly surpassed TikTok to become the most popular entertainment app in Apple’s American App Store. According to Sensor Tower, a data firm, it has been downloaded almost 2m times in the past month. COL’s market value has more than doubled since the start of November, to 22bn yuan ($3bn).

Apps that trace their roots to China have become wildly popular in America in recent years. The cheap products sold by Shein and Temu have found deep markets in America, as have video clips created by TikTok’s mostly Western users. ReelShort builds on earlier Crazy Maple apps, such as Chapters (a story-game launched in 2017, which lets readers choose their own adventure) and Kiss (which offers a wide selection of romance and mystery stories, and now ranks 14th in the App Store’s books category). The trend contradicts the idea that Chinese cultural products do not translate well for Western audiences.

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