How a "boring" TV drama becomes so successful and what it shows about today's China

I finished watching “我的阿勒泰 My Altai” this week. Like many fans, I absolutely adore this mini-series. It’s a unique drama that’s not supposed to succeed commercially in China, but it did. Fans have been raving about it several weeks after its debut.

In today’s post, I want to explain why this show is unique, and what its surprising commercial success tells about today’s China.

The drama

“My Altai” is a mini-series about…actually I struggle to find what it’s about, and that’s the most unique thing about this drama: It’s a show about almost nothing.

The main protagonist is a young, ethnically Han lady, Wenxiu, aspiring to become a writer. Wenxiu used to work in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang but had total career failure there. She chose to return home to the Altai to live with her mother, Zhang Fengxia, an intrepid village shopkeeper. The three women, including the demented grandma, live among a nomadic tribe of Kazakhs. The main male protagonist is a dashing young Kazakh man, Batay, who struggles between his personal career passions of being a horse breeder and his obligation to look after the herd of his father, Sulitan, a Kazakh hunter-herder who still lives in the past. Wenxiu and Batay eventually fell in love, but only in a lightly depicted courtship that almost only served as a backdrop for the bigger story.

Which is its remarkable lack of a real “story”.

Dramatic tensions are almost intentionally minimized, with the exception of maybe the last 2 episodes. Most of the time, viewers are simply treated with breathtaking sceneries, a healthy dose of chuckling little moments of cross-cultural communication (and miscommunication), and witty commentaries about life, about nature, about how to live, and about death.

Top to bottom: Wenxiu, the female lead, running around in the picturesque Altai prairie; Wenxiu’s mother, Zhang Fengxia, shedding a few drops of tears for a love affair running sour; Batay, Sulitan, and Zhang Fengxia and the families moving the herd to the summer ranch

Take this example, written by a blogger on WeChat (translation by GPT-4o and me):

In the drama, some potentially sensational and dramatic events were handled in a way that left the audience “disappointed”.

For instance, there's the life-and-death economic dispute between the female lead's family and the male lead's family. The male lead's brother is an alcoholic who often drinks on credit at the female lead's family's small shop, drinking without restraint. The female lead's mother is shrewd and not worried about him not paying back, as their cattle and sheep are as good as hard currency. This continued until he drank himself unconscious and froze to death on the road.

In this death case, the female lead's mother bears some responsibility. If the male lead's family pursued the matter, it could lead to a dramatic and bloody conflict.

Around the themes of murder for financial gain and repaying debts, this could easily stretch out for ten episodes or more.

But unexpectedly, everyone behaved with dignity. The male lead's father made a statement: "Let's keep things separate. I am very angry that you allowed him to drink on credit, but his death is his own doing. We must repay this debt. We don't have the money now, but you can take the camel, which is worth much more than the debt."

I do not remember the last time I watched this type of drama, (not even this kind of movie) in China. Usually, to grab the audience’s attention, you will have to fill every episode with melodramas and dramatic tension at every turns. It’s also rare to see a mini-series that lasts for only 8 episodes, while most Chinese TV dramas can easily run to 50+ or even 70+ episodes. It’s also clear there will not be any sequels to this.

That it can be so boring, while so popular at the same time, tells you that this is not just a drama, but a cultural milestone that has struck some major nerve in contemporary Chinese culture. It’s a drama about some characters living in the Altai, but it’s also about who the viewers are and who they have become.

What does drama tell about contemporary Chinese culture

At Baiguan, we talked a lot about this recent phenomenon of “躺平Lying flat”, and the concurrent phenomenon of “内卷involution”. They are recent languages, but are they recent phenomena?

I always believe language is not just a tool. As James Gleick said in his book The Information:

Language is not best seen as something separate from the mind,

it is what the mind does.

It is no coincidence that the two words “lying flat” and “involution” were created almost at the same time a few years ago. They are but two sides of the same coin.

That’s not to say there was no “involution” before. There was a lot. In fact, involution may be all that used to be.

When economic conditions were dim and economic prospects were very bright, everyone was expected to study, to work, and to compete to their utmost extremes. And because everyone was expected to be competitive, there is no such thing called “over”-competitive. And since there was no self-knowledge of “involution”, the language for it would not appear, even though by today’s standards the people of yesterday were living, unwittingly, very involuted lives.

So in this sense, “involution” was indeed a recent phenomenon, not just a new language term. It did not exist before, as far as the people who live under it are concerned.

It was a combination of a betterment of existing economic conditions and a lowering of economic expectations that breathed new thinking into the otherwise monolithic cultural context. People start to realize, oh, shoot, so we used to live in this “involuted” environment. Some of those people would think of “lying flat”, of “escaping” the recently re-discovered “involution”.

And within this context, it’s easy to see that “My Altai” is what those people are fleeing to, while her scenic, carefree prairies are what they choose to lie flat on.

But is it just a tourist spot they are fleeing to? Do Chinese people just want to do more traveling and chill out? Does this shift in cultural attitudes mean Chinese people will be more and more lazy? Does that mean China’s productivity will decline?

I think this cultural shift is much deeper than that. You will miss the bigger picture if you don’t look at it more closely.

Here, again, “My Altai” sheds light on the potential answers to those questions.

Perhaps one of the most popular and the most soul-touching quotes of the mini-series came from Zhang Fengxia, Wenxiu’s shopkeeper mother and a great female character:

After winning back home a big camel after many mini-disasters at debt collection, Wenxiu asked her mother: Look, mother! Even though I am very clumsy, but am I not also a useful person?

Zhang Fengxia: Li Wenxiu, what do you mean by “useful”?

Did I give birth to you only for you to serve others?

Look around at those trees, those grass in this grassland.

If there are people who use them, who eat them, then they are useful.

But if nobody use them, they just exist there being themselves in this grassland, isn’t it also good?

They are free, aren’t they?

Let me quote and translate from the same WeChat blogger (emphasis my own):

Once you get through the first three episodes and reach the fourth, the show reveals an intriguing quality that captivates you.

Its counterintuitive, unconventional, and atypical narrative style builds a sweeping force that, while initially disappointing, ultimately sharpens your perception and engages your heart and mind.

With this newfound clarity, the show becomes a mirror. The questions you ask it in moments of confusion or disappointment are reflected back at you.

When you question, "How can such an ordinary girl, who failed to become a writer like Eileen Chang and is clumsy in her prairie life, be the protagonist with no significant character arc?"

The mirror responds, "Why can't an ordinary person be the protagonist?"

When you wonder, "This story could easily have a small climax every ten minutes and a major one each episode, with tear-jerking and dramatic moments. Instead, it's as plain as herding cattle and sheep. Can this still be good?"

The mirror asks, "Why can't something plain be good?"

When you note, "The main characters and their relationships start and end almost the same. There are some changes, but not significant. No one has lived out a more ideal version of themselves, nor has anyone profoundly changed another. Can a character with no obvious growth still be considered a well-crafted one?"

The mirror questions, "Must personal growth and success be the only measures of a character? Isn't it enough to push yourself in your own life without also applying those standards to fictional characters? Isn't that exhausting?"

These counterquestions lead you to reflect: maybe things don't have to be the way we expect. Perhaps different approaches can also work.

As the female lead's mother says, the trees and grass on the prairie are useful if someone uses them. If not, they still stand free and beautiful on the prairie.

This is what truly moves the audience about this show.

Beneath the seemingly disappointing and frustrating plot design, and the less-than-successful and halo-free character portrayals, lies a rare non-judgmental stance—

It refrains from hastily judging what is right or wrong, progress or regression, civilization or barbarism, usefulness or uselessness.

It allows these opposing elements and ideas to grow naturally on the Altai prairie, like plants, cattle, and sheep. To borrow the theme, everyone has their own way of living; you have your Altai, and I have mine.

Our culture sorely lacks this perspective.

Perhaps this is the hidden gem that Altai offers us all.

What does it mean to be useful?

And what does it mean to be useless?

As Zhuangzi said, "Everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful, but few know the usefulness of what is useless."

I think now you can see what really is this fundamental shift in our collective psyche.

It’s freedom, freedom not in the political sense but at a much deeper level. A cultural, psychological, and personal revolution deeper in our hearts and minds that have only recently taken place. It’s the freedom from outside expectations. It’s the freedom from what other people want for you. It’s the freedom to love and to choose for yourselves. It’s the freedom to live, to think and to exist in the way your heart dictates, in a truly modern way.

I commented before that China will produce great cultures. And this judgment has nothing to do with censorship. The censorship system is but the political embodiment of the collective social and cultural norms of the time.

What is more important is how these collective norms have evolved. Are they becoming more and more mature? Are they more and more at ease with ourselves? Are they allowing ourselves to find inner peace and inner freedom?

A heart that’s truly free will find a voice to speak.

It took only 4 decades for China to change from a pariah state to possibly already the world’s largest economy. But it would take longer for its mind to truly modernize, and to be free. This inner revolution will have far-reaching consequences on the economy, on businesses, on cultural expression, and on creativity and innovation.

Let’s just all be patient here.

This show also has remarkable treatment of gender and racial issues.

The creator of the show, Teng Congcong is a female director herself, while female characters of different ethnicities are at the front and center of it.

At the same time, the Altai region is a predominately Kazakh region in Xinjiang, and most of the characters in the show are Kazakh people, who speak Kazakh most of the time and only some of them speak Mandarin in the show. Even the communist party boss of the local village is a Kazakh. There are also depictions of local Mongolian and Daur people (a Mongolic people who are descendants of the ancient Khitan tribes.)

Discussions of these issues, and what do they show about the cultural perception of gender and race in contemporary China will make another new post, which I won’t be able to finish this week. If more than 100 of you are interested, I will commit to writing about it later.