CHANGING TIMES
TV and film industry insiders discuss Chinese dramas’ ups and downs in Vietnamese market
The No.1 most popular TV series in Vietnam in 2017 was Chinese period romance drama
Princess Agents while three other Chinese mainland dramas also entered the top 10 that year, noted Vietnamese scholar Phan Thu Vân at a recent Beijing film and TV industry event. China’s hit 2017 drama Ten Miles of
Peach Blossoms ranked at No.4 while Tencent Video’s online series Master
Devil Don’t Kiss Me and The Eternal Love ranked at No.9 and No.10 respectively on the “2017’s Most Popular Dramas in Vietnam” list that Phan compiled based on Google data about the most-searched dramas in Vietnam in 2017.
Three among the four Chinese dramas on the list were period romances, a well-known genre in Vietnam.
Past glory
“China’s period romance dramas have always been popular in Vietnam, for example recent years’ Empresses in
the Palace and Scarlet Heart. Actually, many Vietnamese audiences first got to know Chinese dramas through Hong Kong period series,” Phan, a movie literature lecturer at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education and also a film and TV industry worker, told the Global Times.
The fever for Chinese dramas
in Vietnam started decades ago in the 1980s when TV adaptations of China’s ancient Four Literature Classics – Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three
Kingdoms and Outlaws of the Marsh – became extremely popular across the country.
“A reason behind Chinese dramas’ popularity in Vietnam is that the two countries share a close connection in culture, history, customs and ethics. Also, many Chinese literature classics had already been translated into Vietnamese by then, I knew the stories even before I watched their TV adaptations,” said Phan.
Entering the 1990s, popular Hong Kong and Taiwan dramas were imported into Vietnam where they became phenomenal hits, especially those adapted from the works of famous martial arts novelist Jin Yong.
Between 2000 and 2010, Chinese dramas’ market share in Vietnam remained strong as the State-run Vietnam Television(VTV) assigned “roughly 50 percent of its imported drama quotas to Chinese dramas,” according to Phan.
But since then that figure has dropped as more and more Vietnamese viewers started to embrace dramas from other countries including the US, South Korea, Japan and Thailand. Moreover, Vietnam – produced dramas are also becoming one of Chinese dramas’ biggest competitors on the market, as evidenced by the fact that four of the dramas on Phan’s list are from Vietnam.
New trends
Vietnam’s TV drama industry has been experiencing rapid growth over the past few years and local audiences are becoming more picky about what they want to watch, Chu Quang Thang, a Vietnamese director and screenwriter who came to Beijing on a study program, told the Global Times.
“The pace of life is becoming faster in big Vietnamese cities such as Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi where viewers, especially younger ones, don’t have much time for TV series and have a growing demand for highquality content, so it’s natural to see poor-quality dramas get kicked out of the competition,” he noted.
Another interesting trend cropped up last year.
“The year 2017 witnessed a large number of Vietnam-produced TV adaptations based on foreign works,” Chu noted. Ranking second on the list, Living with Husband’s Mother is a Vietnam-produced TV series adapted from Chinese writer Jia Xiao’s novel of the same name, while the No.8 drama is an adaptation of South Korean hit sitcom High Kick!. “A successful TV adaptation should relate to Vietnamese people’s lives in order to appeal to their interests, as such screenwriters have to add in or revise many details that can resonate with local audiences when they adapt foreign scripts.” Moreover, recent years have also witnessed increased film and TV production exchanges between Vietnam and China. For instance, more Vietnamese film and TV scholars are attending events in China and the first China-Vietnam co-produced comedy film Lost in Vietnam debuted in 2016. “I think it is a good start, as it seems that industry insiders in Vietnam and China still have limited knowledge about each other’s market – we’re looking forward to more communication with our Chinese counterparts,” Phan said.