Eros and Thanatos in Promotional Shots for Chinese Microdrama with Sheng-mei Ma

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A Chinese microdrama (短劇duanju or short-form web series) comprises approximately 20 to 30 episodes of 10-15 minutes each, designed for streaming on smartphone, iPad, and other electronic devices. A formulaic promotional shot and a clickbait features the male and female leads thrown in a tight embrace, eyes locked, lips barely apart, while each points a knife or pistol at the other’s throat, or simply choking the lover with bare hands most “aesthetically.” Flirting with sadomasochism sinologized and normalized as nue’ai (虐愛tortured/abused love), this trending genre includes series such as Born to Die (赴刃2025 a period drama with knife only), Found & Lost (卿本佳人2024), Xiang’ai henwan (相愛恨晚2025, Belated Love, both early modern dramas with knife/stiletto and pistol), The Warrior (鉴心2024 both male and female holding pistols), Guilty Maid (替罪丫环 2024 choking with bare hands), and The Antidote to Love (云赫谣2025 with a red silk belt covering his eyes, her hand caressing his cheek despite being shackled in the wrist with a chain that encircles both, reminiscent of BDSM or kinbaku). Such shots maximize the microdrama’s sales pitch with the throes of Freudian Eros and Thanatos, implying erotic asphyxiation “with Chinese characteristics” from centuries-long histories of punishment by decapitation. “Necking” acquires a whole new meaning in connection with beheading, which is really de-necking. Whereas Hollywood action thrillers cut to the chase, Chinese microdramas cut to the throat, so to speak. Given the brevity of microdramas and the target audience’s lifestyle on the go, extreme sensory stimulation, even overload, serves to grab eyeballs, entailing scene after scene of pleasure and pain entwined, young bodies spilling love and blood. Whereas kitschy banality clumsily throws the game of artistic expression, even entertainment value, the coupling of Faustian Love and Death within these promotional shots, these “faces” of microdramas, intimates digital intimacy between Chinese viewers and their viewing devices, wherein lurk the dream self and double life. Chinese selves are bound by, fixated on their cell phones of consumerism in denial of the larger authoritarian communist cell. The repetition compulsion over fleeting raptures of microdramas’s S/M numbs and displaces the longue durée of collective bondage and subjugation. Such psychic transference away from China’s here and now finds analogues temporally and spatially, be it the imperial dynastic setting, the decadent 1930s Shanghai International Settlement venue, or a lawless foreign land—anywhere but the current China.

Short Bio

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Chinese Serial (2026); Cultural Bifocals (2025); China Pop! (2024) ; The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016) among them, he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).