The news that China is cracking down on ‘viral micro dramas’ saturated with soft porn and materialism ought to provoke more than a shrug from the disaffected Western intellectual. We are accustomed to viewing such moves as the heavy hand of authoritarianism, but let us pause, reflect, and perhaps even tut sympathetically. For in the West, we have allowed our screens to become a sewer of algorithmic degradation, all in the name of ‘freedom’.
The Chinese, at least, seem to remember that a society without moral guardrails is like Rome without the sack of Brennus: complacent, decadent, and ripe for a fall. These micro dramas, those bite-sized bits of narrative junk food, are not art. They are the TikTokification of culture, the reduction of human longing to a cheap, gaudy advertisement.
And yes, they are everywhere. They push a world where desire is a commodity, where the body is a product, and where happiness is a flat-screen television. The Chinese state, in its wisdom, has decided that this digital detritus is a threat to national character.
And they are right. But we, in our smug Western exceptionalism, label this censorship. We forget that every society, if it is to endure, must decide what it will tolerate.
The Victorians had their Comstock laws; the Romans had their sumptuary laws. The modern liberal order, however, has surrendered to the market. The market says: give people what they want.
And what they want, evidently, is to watch attractive people in minimal clothing pining for a handbag. This is not freedom; it is the soft tyranny of the algorithm. China’s move is a reminder that culture must be curated, that a nation’s soul must be defended against the basest instincts of commerce.
The West would do well to take note, but I suspect they will continue to equate moral supervision with tyranny, even as their own culture rots from within.
