Screenshot of US TV series Prison Break

A storm was triggered on Chinese social media on Thursday after the authorities cracked down on an unofficial fansub group that created subtitles for foreign TV shows. 

The fansub group has accompanied Chinese fans throughout the ups and downs of US TV series. From Prison Break to WandaVision, new series have gained fans who have been unable to find similarly well-made Chinese TV series. 

The crackdown on Renren Film and Television Subtitle Group kicked off a wave of collective nostalgia among former and current fans of US TV series, who took to social media to share their memories of them. 

They also talked about how the government's increasing efforts to crack down on piracy is starting to make them panic. Piracy is no more, but where are the official versions that can be watched legally? Will they no longer be able to watch new series right after they debut in the US? How will they avoid spoilers or take part in the fun of dissecting the plot twists with other fans around the world? 

Experts said that as long as TV series abide by the relevant policies of China, they can still be imported into China legally. It really all depends on the US studios to take the laws of China into consideration.

Popular US TV series 

2005 could be considered the beginning of the boom of US TV series in China as the first season of Prison Break became popular domestically.

"If you travel back to 2005 or 2006 and enter an internet café, there would be people there watching Prison Break," one netizen called "qiuyoujige" wrote on Douban, a popular Chinese media review platform.

The popularity of Prison Break made the internet community related to US dramas move forward.

Through reports published in July 2014, the prosperity of US dramas in China can be tracked. Youku bought 59 American shows, while Sohu had 56. The rising importance of these US shows was also underlined by their prices, rising 15 percent per year.

There were about 200 new TV series produced in the US in one year and almost one third were introduced in China, according to a report by China Economy in 2013.

Eva, a 27-year-old fan of US TV series started watching US dramas when she was 17 years old. 

Eva recalls that she was crazy about the TV show Friends, and had a note book with sentences and some expressions from the show, which she never heard when learning English in China. 

Eva told the Global Times that she used to download episodes and she would have to find subtitles for them. "It was like a celebration to me if I could accumulate all the episodes for one season," she said.  

To meet needs of viewers whose English wasn't good enough to understand the shows, the fansub groups appeared along with the series.

Gong Tengqian, a 28-year-old women living in Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday that when she was a college student majoring in English translation, she once worked as a part-time subtitle translator for Dajia, mainly translating for US and British dramas. Dajia currently has 800,000 followers on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo.

She recalled that US dramas have had huge popularity in China in the last decade. "I joined the subtitle translation group to practice my English translation skills, and I am a die-hard fan of American dramas like Friends, Big Bang Theory and Modern Family," said Gong.

Going down

The turning point came in November 2014 when Chinese authorities published regulations for introducing overseas TV shows.

A report by Southern Metropolis Daily said that foreign TV shows would have to be reviewed first before being broadcast.

"US dramas even faced content deletion or being banned from broadcast if they had violent content," the report said.

Meanwhile, the production level of domestic TV shows has been improving, so Chinese audiences have more choices for entertainment. This is also an important reason why the popularity of US dramas has been fading in China, Shi Wenxue, a cultural critic based in Beijing, told the Global Times.

Yichen, an Art university student born in 2000, is not worried about the disappearance of subtitle groups such as Renren.  

"My favorites are suspense shows. If I cannot find any on Renren, I'll look on iQiyi, or just find some cartoons," said Yichen. 

Yichen is a fan of iQiyi's Light On channel, and considers shows like The Bad Kids a good representation of today's Chinese TV dramas. 

Gong also pointed that US dramas are gradually falling out of favor in China as some have been disappointing, such as the finale of Game of Thrones, and better Chinese TV dramas have also appeared.

The future

"The era of watching pirated TV series has ended, which is good for China to build a healthier system of intellectual property rights," Huo Zhengxin, a law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times.  

Cooperation between Chinese video platform Tencent and HBO is also going on. Some popular series such as Game of Thrones and Westworld produced by HBO can be watched on Tencent.

As fansub groups face tighter restrictions, many fans have put their hopes on more TV series being introduced, although production companies will need to obey China's regulations on content for the dramas to enter the Chinese market.

The cultural critic Shi pointed out the difficulties in this process. "These authorized editions need a longer translation time and even if they can be successfully broadcast, audiences might not like them."

Global Times