
She said she received far fewer collaboration requests from content providers in 2021.Ĭhinese content creators always joke that they dance with shackles on, meaning they try to satisfy the censors while appealing to their audiences. A few weeks later, both companies told her that they had decided not to proceed because there was little hope of getting the censors’ approval for a history series.
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Lilian Li, a writer in Beijing, said Tencent and a studio working with iQiyi approached her last year about creating a streaming series based on one of her history novels.
#Iso chinese job tv
Many film, TV and streaming projects have been canceled or killed over concerns of increasingly harsh and unpredictable censorship, said people in the industry. Zhao confirmed the details in his social media account, but declined to comment further.) IQiyi did not respond to requests for comment. He blamed, in part, censors’ slow approval. “The biggest problem for our industry is severe shortage of content supply,” iQiyi’s chief executive, Gong Yu, told analysts in November. Its share prices fell 85 percent from their high in 2021, reflecting investors’ concerns that the company, once aspiring to be China’s Netflix, will be short of shows that can attract more subscribers and advertisers. Zhao, iQiyi, had an abysmal quarter, losing about $268 million. In July, the authorities stopped Didi from signing up new users and ordered app stores to remove its services pending a cybersecurity investigation. The e-commerce giant Alibaba’s profitability declined 38 percent from a year earlier.ĭidi, once the most valuable start-up in the country, reported an operating loss of $6.3 billion for the first nine months of 2021. In the third quarter of last year, China’s biggest internet company, Tencent, posted its slowest revenue growth since its public listing in 2004. Many publicly listed companies have seen their share prices fall by half, if not more. Some internet companies have been forced to shut down, while others are suffering from huge losses or disappointing earnings. Hu Xijin, the newly retired editor of the official newspaper Global Times and an infamous propagandist, said he hoped that regulatory actions should help make most companies healthier instead of leaving them “dying on the operating table.” The former head of China’s sovereign wealth fund urged restrictions on the power of regulators. Under the direction of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government’s unbridled hand is meddling in big ways and small, leaving companies second-guessing their strategies and praying to not become the next targets for crackdown.Įven people within the system are alarmed by the heavy-handed approach. The ranks of the unemployed technology workers are swelling, as China’s once vibrant internet industry is hit by a harsh and capricious regulatory crackdown. Then barely a month into his new job, he was let go when iQiyi laid off more than 20 percent of its staff. He was on track to achieve a much-desired middle-class life, documenting his rise on his social media account. In November of 2021, he moved to Shanghai to join one of China’s biggest video platforms, iQiyi. Like many ambitious young Chinese, Zhao Junfeng studied hard in college and graduate school so he could land a coveted job as a programmer at a big Chinese internet company.Īfter finishing graduate school in 2019, he joined an e-commerce company in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, got married and adopted a cat named Mango.
